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THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO., 
NEW YORK. 



THE MINISTER AS 
PROPHET 



BY 



CHARLES EDWARD JEFFERSON 

Pastor of the Broadway Tabernacle 
in New York City 



NEW YORK 
THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 
PUBLISHERS 
-C 



FM0S1 



LIBRARY of OONGRESS 
Two Copies rteceived 

MAR 25 1905 

Oopyngm entry * 
COPY B. ; 



"BV+. 



3s? 



Copyright, 1905, 
BY THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 

Published March, 1905. 



ID 

If 

of 



THE GEORGE SHEPARD 
LECTURES ON PREACHING 

3lt Bangor SHjeokigical Semmarjj 
1904-1905 



CONTENTS 

i 



PAGE 

THE DIMENSIONS OF THE WORK . . i 



II 
THE THREE MEN INVOLVED ... 39 

III 
THE GROWING OF SERMONS ... 75 

IV 

FORM AND MANNER . . . . .ill 

V 

THE PLACE OF DOGMA IN PREACHING 146 



THE MINISTER AS PROPHET 



The Dimensions of the Work 

A minister of the Gospel is expected 
to do a wider variety of things than any- 
other man in the community. The divi- 
sion of labor has been carried farther in 
every other profession than in the minis- 
try. His work is multiform, and it is 
impossible in five brief lectures to cover 
more than a small fraction of it. 

The minister is an administrator. His 
church is an organization, and like all 
organizations it must have an executive 
head. The minister is that head. It is 
in one sense a machine, and like all 
machines must be run. Friction must be 
reduced, the wheels must be lubricated, 
repairs must be made, every part of the 



2 The Minister as Prophet 

mechanism must be subjected to constant 
scrutiny and supervision, in order that 
the machine may do the work for which 
it has been created. The work of ad- 
ministration is of great importance, but 
into that kingdom we cannot enter now. 

The minister is a pastor, a shepherd 
of the flock. He must tend and feed 
the sheep. He must know them all by 
name, and he must know also their dis- 
positions, needs, and habits, and knowing 
these he must be acquainted with the 
pastures where the grass is greenest and 
most abundant, and he must know where 
the most refreshing waters flow, and he 
must know the character and the methods 
of the ei.emies by which the flock is most 
likely to be attacked. The work of shep- 
herding is of vast concern, but into this 
province we cannot go. 

The minister is a priest; he officiates 
at the altar of worship. He is the spokes- 
man of the people as they offer up their 
sacrifice of praise and prayer. He leads 



The Dimensions of the Work 3 

the congregation to the throne of grace. 
Upon his lips the desires and thoughts 
of many hearts become vocal. He reads 
the scriptures, interpreting by emphasis 
and intonation the revelation which has 
come through holy men of old. While 
he does not lead the singing, it is for 
him to decide what shall be the character 
and amount of the music in which the 
church shall express its adoration and 
thanksgiving. He is the ordained minis- 
trant in the service in which the Lord's 
people bear public testimony to their faith, 
and to him is intrusted the entire conduct 
of worship in the house of prayer. It is 
a critical and difficult work, but into this 
wide region we cannot make ou :: way. 

The minister is a moral and religious 
leader. As a guide he has relations not 
only to his own congregation, but to the 
entire denomination of which he is a repre- 
sentative, and to the church universal of 
which he is a member, and not only does 
he have relations to organized Christianity, 



4 The Minister as Prophet 

but he is related to the great philan- 
thropic and reformatory movements of 
his age, and belongs in a special sense to 
the entire community in the midst of 
which he does his work. All these rela- 
tions bring with them unescapable obliga- 
tions and multitudinous duties. The work 
of minister as patriot and citizen is one 
of far-reaching influence and significance, 
but from all this territory we are for the 
time shut out. 

The minister is a prophet of the Lord. 
By prophet is meant a man who speaks 
for God. He is preeminently a speaker. 
His business is to speak for another. He 
is a truth-teller, and therefore first of all a 
truth-seeker. He must dig for it as for 
hidden treasures, and having found it, he 
must coin it and put it into circulation 
among the people. Like a Moses, he must 
go up into the mountain and talk with God 
face to face, coming down and giving to 
his brethren his latest revelation. He is a 
missionary intrusted with the good news, 



The Dimensions of the Work 5 

and he must speak his message without 
diminution or any blurring of its contents. 
He is an ambassador sent from the court 
of heaven to the court of earth, and his 
life is one long and passionate appeal to 
men to become reconciled to God. 

This work of speaking for God is only a 
part of the modern minister's duty, but it 
is a realm of such wide dimensions that 
we shall be justified in confining our atten- 
tion exclusively to it. But in passing over 
all the other departments of ministerial 
activity and shutting ourselves up with 
preaching alone, I would not have any one 
of you think that these other forms of 
work hold in my mind a place of compara- 
tive unimportance, or that in my judgment 
a minister can shirk all his duties but that 
of preaching and still accomplish the work 
which God has given him to do. If time 
allowed, I could speak for five evenings on 
each branch of work to which reference 
has been made, and still be unable to say 
all that can reasonably be said about their 



6 The Minister as Prophet 

importance to a minister who wishes to 
be a workman that needeth not to be 
ashamed. 

My ground for directing your attention 
especially to preaching is not because I 
underestimate the other forms of ministe- 
rial duty, or because I would have you 
ignore them in your own thought and 
work ; but because there are just now sev- 
eral special reasons why a minister of the 
Gospel should give himself with renewed 
zeal to the great work of preaching. The 
considerations which have led me thus to 
limit the scope of these lectures are : — 

i. The work of preaching is the most 
difficult of all the things which a minister 
is called to do. Indeed, it is the most 
difficult task to which any mortal can set 
himself. It is at once the most strenuous 
and the most exacting of all forms of labor. 
It requires a fuller combination of faculties 
and a finer balance of powers than are re- 
quired in any other department of human 
effort. It is a difficult thing to paint a 



The Dimensions of the Work 7 

portrait. To gain the skill required to 
place the features of the human face on 
the canvas in such a way as that they shall 
breathe and speak requires the unflagging 
toil of years, but how much more difficult 
it is with human words to paint the face 
of Christ so that he shall woo and win the 
hearts of men. 

It is a difficult thing to master the 
mysteries of the world of tone, and create 
harmonies and melodies which will set 
the nerves a-tingling, but much more diffi- 
cult it is to catch the music of the world 
eternal and translate it into human speech 
so that human hearts on which it falls 
shall give back the same celestial vibra- 
tions. It is a great thing to chisel the 
marble into forms which seem alive, but 
immeasurably more difficult it is to chisel 
character by means of words into forms 
which will please the King. It is a difficult 
thing to act upon the stage, to interpret 
adequately the lines of the masters of the 
drama. One of the greatest living actors, 



8 The Minister as Prophet 

now over seventy years of age, says that 
he began to study the art of acting when 
a boy of three, and that he is studying it 
still. But how much more study and prac- 
tice is required for the right rendering to 
human hearts of the thoughts and purposes 
of God. The lawyer has a difficult work. 
It is hard to apply human law to all the 
tangled and complicated affairs of men, 
but to apply the law is not half so difficult 
as it is to apply the Gospel. The work of 
the physician is arduous, and without skill 
and knowledge he is nothing ; but to minis- 
ter to a mind sin-sick, to soothe a con- 
science crying out in pain, " to pluck from 
the memory a rooted sorrow " and " raze 
out the written troubles of the brain " and 
" cleanse the stuff' d bosom of that perilous 
stuff which weighs upon the heart" — this 
requires a skill and knowledge and wisdom 
and power greater than any which the 
doctors know. Because the work of 
preaching is so difficult is my first reason 
for speaking to you about nothing else. 



The Dimensions of the Work 9 

2. But notwithstanding the work is 
above all others difficult, ministers are just 
now in danger of receiving less help in mas- 
tering the art of preaching than in learning 
any other form of work. Fresh emphasis 
is being placed on the work of administra- 
tion. With the increasing complexity of 
human life the church as a machine is be- 
coming more and more intricate. Social 
and industrial problems are at the front, 
and expert hands seem to be more needed 
than instructive tongues. The minister's 
study has fallen into the background, and 
the minister's office is the place in which 
he is expected to do his work. In a com- 
mercial age it is assumed that a clergyman 
must have the knack of doing things, and 
the business aspect of religion is the one 
which is uppermost in the public mind. 

Along with this new emphasis on admin- 
istration there is fresh interest in cere- 
monialism. Our forms of worship are 
discovered to be altogether too colorless 
and too bare to suit a generation which 



io The Minister as Prophet 

has developed all the nerves of taste, and 
so men are discussing everywhere the 
advisability of enriching the forms of ser- 
vice. There is a widespread feeling that 
the forms must be more stately, dignified, 
and elaborate, and that the advantages of 
a liturgy without its dangers are within 
the reach of every church. But with this 
increased emphasis on the value and place 
of liturgy there is a slackening sense in 
many quarters of the value of the sermon. 
As music increases the sermon decreases, 
and many a student for the ministry is to- 
day more concerned about the ordering of 
worship than about the creation of effective 
sermons. 

Even in our seminaries, which are in 
theory schools in which men are trained 
to preach, the multiplication of new and 
fascinating studies has had a tendency 
to throw homiletics into the shade. Ar- 
chaeology, historical criticism, and soci- 
ology have but recently come to their best 
estate, and the worlds which they bring to 



The Dimensions of the Work 1 1 

our attention are so vast and stimulating 
and important that it is not to be wondered 
at that many a student is far more inter- 
ested in the latest results of criticism and 
research than in the art of presenting New- 
Testament ideas in such a way as to open 
the springs of the heart and turn the 
streams of conduct into new channels. 

Moreover, there is a widespread feeling 
that preaching as an institution is more or 
less obsolescent. Sermons, men say, have 
had their day. Just as our national Con- 
gress has ceased to be the arena for in- 
teresting and instructive debate, so the 
Christian pulpit has ceased to be a center 
to which men look for either instruction or 
for uplift. And so the preacher is in dis- 
repute. Coleridge once said that in " older 
times writers were looked up to as inter- 
mediate beings between angels and men; 
afterwards they were regarded as vener- 
able and perhaps inspired teachers ; subse- 
quently they descended to the level of 
learned and instructive friends; but in 



12 The Minister as Prophet 

modern days they are deemed culprits 
more than benefactors/' 

A similar process has been going on 
in the public mind concerning preachers. 
Once they were more than human, then 
supremely human, later on interesting 
and useful, but more recently they are 
regarded in many sections of society as 
impertinences and bores. The opinion 
of the world cannot fail to influence the 
thought and feeling of ministers them- 
selves. It is not uncommon to hear 
ministers speak in disparaging and apolo- 
getic tones about their sermons. And 
even though they say nothing slightingly 
with their lips, the place which they give 
the sermon in their thought and prepara- 
tion reveals only too clearly that they have 
lost their faith in its importance and their 
ambition to make it what a sermon ought 
to be. Rome was near her fall when the 
priests who ministered at her altars joked 
about the mass. It is a sign of skepticism 
and decadence in the Protestant pulpit 



The Dimensions of the Work 13 

that so many ministers can joke about 
their sermons and listen to attacks upon 
the work of preaching without indignant 
protest or swift rebuke. 

3. The greatest danger confronting the 
church of Christ in America to-day is a 
possible decadence of the pulpit. Let the 
pulpit decay, and the cause of Christ is lost. 
Nothing can take the place of preaching. 
There is no power under heaven equal to 
the power of a God-inspired pulpit. An- 
thems and hymns, responsive readings 
and creed recitations, prayers written and 
prayers extempore, all have their place, 
and when rightly used are means of grace ; 
but all of them put together cannot take 
the place of the exposition of God's word 
by a man whose lips have been touched 
by a coal from off God's altar. An ig- 
norant pulpit is the worst of all scourges. 
An ineffective pulpit is the most lamenta- 
ble of all scandals. The cause of Christ 
is hopelessly handicapped and blocked 
when Christian preachers forget how 



14 The Minister as Prophet 

to preach. We must guard the pulpit 
with all diligence, for out of it are the 
issues of life. Any signs of decay in it 
must fill all well-wishers of the church 
with regret and alarm. 

And history will not allow us to escape 
the fact that it is easy for the pulpit to 
decay. The prophet has always had a 
tendency to degenerate into the priest. 
The man who speaks for God is always 
prone to slip down into the man who 
performs ceremonies for God. The alti- 
tudes on which the prophet of the Lord 
must live are so lofty that poor, frail 
human nature, finding it exhausting to 
breathe the difficult air, seeks the first 
opportunity to come down. But every 
time the prophet degenerates into a priest 
a new darkness falls upon the world. 
There were great prophets in Israel in 
Elijah's day and in Isaiah's day and in 
Haggai's day, but little by little the light 
of prophecy died down, the men who 
spoke for God became interested in in- 



The Dimensions of the Work 15 

cense and burnt offerings, and when the 
last of the prophets departed, darkness fell 
on Palestine. 

The Christian church began in a blaze 
of glory — in the glory that burst from 
a sermon. For a season the church had 
great preachers, — Tertullians and Chrys- 
ostoms, Augustines and Ambroses, — but 
gradually the prophetic fire died down, 
instead of the preacher there was only 
the priest, and the world was in dark- 
ness again. The Reformation was ush- 
ered in by a mighty preacher, — Martin 
Luther, — a man educated to be a priest, 
but who, by the grace of God, grew to the 
stature of a preacher. So long as Luther 
and Calvin and Latimer and Knox, and 
the mighty men who came after them, 
kept the pulpit fires burning, the world 
rolled more and more into light, and it 
was daybreak everywhere. But when 
the preachers slid down into pedants, 
there was darkness once more on the 
earth. 



1 6 The Minister as Prophet 

England in the eighteenth century was 
dead, and it was a preacher — John Wes- 
ley — who raised the dead and ushered 
in a new epoch of Christian history. 
Has not America had the same experi- 
ence ? Did we not start with Cotton 
and Hooker and Shepard and Eliot and 
the Mathers, and did not the people who 
sat in the shadow of great hardships see 
a wonderful light ? And when the light 
faded, it was because the great preachers 
were dead ; and there was no life and no 
light in New England till an English- 
man, George Whitefield, and an Ameri- 
can, Jonathan Edwards, stood in the 
pulpit, like anointed princes of God, and 
spoke once more to the people, in burning 
accents, the message of redemption. The 
bones in the valley of death have always 
taken to themselves flesh and stood erect 
on their feet, and the water has always 
gushed out of the rock, and new heavens 
have always bent over a new earth when- 
ever and wherever a man has appeared 



The Dimensions of the Work 17 

who was able to convert the pulpit into a 
throne. 

4. If this is the great danger of the 
Christian church, then we know what is 
its great need. The churches, from the 
Atlantic to the Pacific, are crying out for 
preachers. It is a question often debated 
whether there is a call for more ministers ; 
but however that may be, there is no 
doubt that there is an ever increasing 
demand for more preachers. Why do 
churches with fifty or one hundred appli- 
cants for their pulpit wait for months and 
sometimes for years before they can find 
the man they want? It is sometimes be- 
cause in the whole crowd of applicants 
there is not one man who knows how to 
preach. No man who knows how to 
preach with grace and power need stand 
idle in the market-place a single hour. 
Churches are scouring the country in 
search of such a man, and he cannot 
escape if he would. Throughout my en- 
tire ministerial career I have been receiv- 



1 8 The Minister as Prophet 

ing almost every month, and sometimes 
every week, letters from church commit- 
tees asking, " Do you know a man whom 
you can recommend to us for our pul- 
pit ? " And the churches which ask such 
a question are, as a rule, the large and 
influential churches at the center of great 
populations, where strength and ability 
are needed and where weaklings can avail 
nothing. 

Church committees, when the time 
comes to select a minister, simply stand 
dumfounded and baffled, unable some- 
times for months to find a man with the 
ability and training sufficient to make 
him a power in the pulpit. The great 
universities and the great railroads and 
the great banks and the great business 
houses and the great industrial enterprises 
find it easier to secure capable men to 
carry on their work than do our important 
churches in securing men equal to the 
demands of the modern pulpit. The age 
demands men of power. And unless we 



The Dimensions of the Work 19 

can get men for the pulpit as brainy and 
competent, as versatile and resourceful, as 
virile and effective, as the great captains 
of industry and the merchant princes, the 
church will be handicapped in her labor 
and the ungodly will have fresh occasion 
to blaspheme. 

There are more great openings in the 
Christian church for men of genuine 
ability than in any other department of 
our modern world. But only strong men 
are equal to the problem. The work 
of the preacher is to-day more diffi- 
cult far than it was in the days of our 
fathers, and it is growing more arduous 
and taxing all the time. It will be more 
difficult in twenty years from now than it 
is to-day. The world is growing increas- 
ingly luxurious. Wealth is piling itself up 
in glittering heaps. The world has never 
been so comfortable and cozy as it is 
now, and it will be still more comfortable 
a quarter of a century farther on. With 
life on earth increasingly delightful, it will 



20 The Minister as Prophet 

be increasingly difficult to lift men's eyes 
to the glory of the things which are invis- 
ible and eternal. John Bunyan's man with 
the muck-rake would not look up because 
he was engaged in raking together sticks 
and straws, but the man to whom we 
preach is raking gold and precious stones ; 
and who is strong enough to lift his eyes 
to the celestial crown ? Life is increas- 
ingly crowded. There never have been so 
many papers and books, and songs and 
concerts, and entertainments and lectures 
and plays, and clubs and societies and 
social duties as now. Never have there 
been so many things to play at or to work 
with ; never so many ways to make 
money and to lose money ; never so many 
teachers who are ready to entertain, in- 
struct, or inspire. 

The minister is in a crowd, and he 
must make room for himself or he is 
lost. The cities are growing all the 
time, their populations becoming more 
heterogeneous, their problems more com- 



The Dimensions of the Work 21 

plicated, their interests more multifarious, 
their burdens heavier, their needs more 
urgent, and their perils more alarming. 
The art of living together is a great and 
fine art, and to teach men how to do this 
requires a saint and a sage. The evils 
of our day are all monsters, and only a 
Hercules in whose heart is the spirit of 
Christ can face them and vanquish them. 
The level of culture is rising year by year. 
Streams of young people pour out of our 
universities, academies, and schools, and 
the graduates of these schools have a taste 
which must not be offended, and powers 
of thinking which must not be ignored. 
Bunglers in language and blunderbusses 
in the art of thinking cannot expect to 
catch and hold the attention of the rising 
generation. The man who is to preach 
the unsearchable riches of Christ to culti- 
vated congregations must be a man of 
native force and superb equipment. 

5. What an opportunity is thus afforded 
to the theological seminary for making 



22 The Minister as Prophet 

itself a factor in the civilization of our 
century ! Its supreme work is the training 
of preachers. It is first of all a school of 
the prophets. Whatever else it may do it 
must do this, or it fails to do the one thing 
essential. That it should be even sus- 
pected of being negligent in pursuing its 
supreme work is little less than a calamity. 
The seminaries have for two decades been 
the target for unlimited criticism. Some- 
times the criticism has been discriminating, 
and at other times it has degenerated into 
almost brutal abuse. The arraignment has 
been varied in the mouth of different ac- 
cusers. Sometimes it has been the profess- 
ors who have been cudgeled, sometimes 
it has been the curriculum which has been 
denounced, sometimes scornful things 
have been said of the caliber of the men 
who have presented themselves as stu- 
dents. But whatever the form of the 
criticism, the root of it runs down into the 
fact that our seminaries for some reason or 
other do not seem to be able to supply 



The Dimensions of the Work 23 

the churches with preachers. The gradu- 
ates are in many cases fine scholars, lin- 
guistic experts, church specialists, good 
for professors' chairs and for the work of 
research, but not effective in the pulpit 
as preachers of the word. 

It is surprising how stoutly and stub- 
bornly the churches insist upon preach- 
ers knowing how to preach. They will 
forgive almost everything else, but they 
will not forgive inability to preach. They 
have a wholesome reverence for learning, 
but they would rather have a man with 
no diploma who can preach than a man 
with two diplomas who cannot preach. 
They believe in experience, and acknowl- 
edge its value ; but they would rather 
have a man with no experience who 
can preach than a man with years of 
experience who has lost the gift of pre- 
senting truth in ways which lift and 
strengthen. In all this the churches may 
be stiff-necked and unreasonable, but it 
is a frame of mind which is not likely to 



24 The Minister as Prophet 

be changed. And if I were the president 
of a theological seminary, I should listen 
to what the spirit is saying through the 
churches, and should set my house in order 
for the training of preachers. Every pro- 
fessor in the faculty should be chosen with 
an eye on the question, Will he fit men to 
preach ? and every study in the curriculum 
should be there only on condition that it 
assisted men to preach. I should have 
courses in theology, for theology is the 
queen of the sciences, and without theology 
a preacher is not equipped for his work. 

But along with theology I should multi- 
ply the courses of study which deal with 
the problems of presenting thought in 
such ways as shall reach the reason and 
the emotions and influence the will. The 
science of logic, and the science of debate, 
and the science of rhetoric, and the science 
of elocution, should all have high places, 
higher than have been given them hitherto. 
And in addition to the regular professors I 
should want every month some recognized 



The Dimensions of the Work 25 

pulpit leader to come into personal touch 
with my students, and also some great 
criminal lawyer who has proved indisputa- 
bly by his triumphs that he can by an 
argument influence the thoughts and deci- 
sions of men. 

There should be no stronger argument 
or mightier appeal heard anywhere than 
that which goes forth from the Christian 
pulpit. That men should Sunday after 
Sunday stand in Christian pulpits, igno- 
rant of the fundamental rules of thinking, 
and utterly incompetent to use the Eng- 
lish language with either grace or power, 
is a scandal of such huge dimensions that 
every seminary in the land ought to con- 
secrate itself afresh to the great task of 
putting an end to the scandal, and train- 
ing up a race of preachers who shall be 
able to clothe in fitting form the heavenly 
message intrusted to their lips. 

6. Here then, brethren, is a wide door 
and effectual, and I appeal to you to go in. 
Whatever else you want to be, take a vow 



26 The Minister as Prophet 

that you will first of all be preachers. It 
is a tragic thing to be a feeble and ineffec- 
tive preacher. To speak for half an hour 
on the Lord's day to a company of intelli- 
gent and hungry-hearted people and create 
no atmosphere, make no impression, lift no 
soul nearer heaven, this is something of 
which a man ought to be ashamed and for 
which he ought to repent in sackcloth and 
ashes. You have no right to disgrace 
yourself and degrade the pulpit by a ser- 
mon which does nothing. If you cannot 
start at a definite point and move onward 
with steadfast foot toward a well-defined 
goal, and stop there when you have once 
arrived, you do not have sufficient mental 
discipline to warrant you to think that 
God has called you to be a preacher. You 
cannot afford to do a stupid and ineffec- 
tive thing in the pulpit. You owe it to 
your brother ministers to do your best. 
If you preach poorly, you make it harder 
for all your brethren to gain a hearing. 
You owe it to your profession to con- 



The Dimensions of the Work 27 

tribute your best in order that your 
profession may be advanced. 

All of us suffer from the boobies and 
blunderers who have gone before us. It 
has become a proverb "dull as a sermon/' 
"prosaic as a parson," and there is a preju- 
dice in the public mind against preaching 
which would have been less intense and 
more readily removed had it not been for 
the sickly twaddle and the unctious exhor- 
tation which has so often been palmed off 
under the name of preaching. If you 
by your slipshod preaching create a bias 
against the pulpit, you not only fail to 
enter the kingdom of power yourself, but 
you prevent others from going in. Your 
failure involves not only yourself, but it 
subtracts from the influence of preachers 
everywhere. For the sake of your breth- 
ren in the ministry aim to preach as well 
as you can. And for the sake of the peo- 
ple to whom you as a messenger are sent, 
you ought to be willing never to do less 
than your best. 



28 The Minister as Prophet 

Men and women judge Christianity 
largely from sermons. If you make your 
sermons dull, then religion becomes dull 
also. If you present Christ in such a 
way that he does not attract, then you 
help men to fix themselves in unbelief. 
The worship of God will become to men 
a tedious and irksome thing, unless you 
can fill it with life drawn from the foun- 
tains of your own heart. You never 
know what damage you do by the preach- 
ing of a weak and worthless sermon. 
And in all your congregation there are 
no ears so sensitive and so critical as are 
the ears of a boy. You may have a 
church in which there is no millionaire, 
no professor, no author or painter or ora- 
tor or scholar, no man or woman of culti- 
vation or social prestige, but you will never 
be the pastor of a church in which there 
is not a boy, and that boy ought to be 
your salvation. On entering your pulpit, 
say to yourself, "There is a lad here," and 
for his sake if not for your own you must 



The Dimensions of the Work 29 

preach well. How many thousands of 
men are hopelessly estranged from the 
Christian church and her services because 
in the days of their boyhood they listened 
to sermons which were shallow and cheap, 
only the final Judgment will declare. A 
boy's impressions are deep, and when once 
made no subsequent preacher is likely to 
efface them. 

Sir Walter Scott was all through his 
life biased against the Evangelical branch 
of the Christian church, because when 
a boy he had listened to the ranting 
of a number of ignorant and bigoted 
evangelists. Augustine was the son of 
a Christian mother, but his mother prayed 
for him thirty years apparently in vain. 
Her son was interested in philosophy 
and philosophers, and one of them, Faus- 
tus, had a mighty influence over him. 
The church had no attraction for him. 
Her music and her ceremonies did not 
appeal to him. Her officiating priests 
were not so interesting as the philosophers. 



30 The Minister as Prophet 

But by and by Augustine found his way 
to Milan, and in the cathedral there behold, 
a man ! Ambrose. Like a prophet of the 
Lord he stood there in the pulpit expound- 
ing the scriptures in tones which fell on 
human hearts like flakes of fire. Augus- 
tine listened, pondered, began to read the 
scriptures. The old familiar words of 
Jesus and the apostles began to open, 
unsuspected meanings came into view, and 
thus through the personality of a preacher 
Augustine found his way to God. He 
lived to become one of the giants of the 
church of Christ, and of all men born of 
women since the days of Saul of Tarsus, 
not one has surpassed him in the width of 
his influence or in the enduring splendor 
of his fame. He was saved to the Chris- 
tian church by a man in the pulpit. 

What future saint of God may sit in 
boys' clothing in your congregation you 
cannot know ; but the fact that some- 
where among your hearers there may be 
a boy who by his faith may transform 



The Dimensions of the Work 3 1 

the life of cities or the policy of state, 
should lead you to make unceasing ef- 
forts to make yourself the most effective 
preacher which a man of your native 
gifts and acquired graces can in the 
Providence of God become. 

How can you do it? Only by having 
faith. It is in preaching as in every other 
form of Christian service, the secret of our 
power is faith. If a man has faith as a 
grain of mustard seed, he can perform 
wonders both in the pulpit and out of it. 
No one can preach well who does not 
believe in preaching. He must believe 
that it is a divine institution and that it is 
accompanied by supernatural power. He 
must grasp St. Paul's deep-rooted con- 
viction that it has pleased God to save 
the world by the foolishness of preaching. 

The voice for which the preacher is to 
listen always is the Master's voice, saying, 
" Go preach the Gospel," and hearing this 
the voices of the world will not disconcert 
nor make afraid. The world is always 



32 The Minister as Prophet 

doing its best to discourage preachers. 
The devil would rather have a minister 
do anything else than preach a sermon. 
He will persuade him if possible not to 
preach at all, and if he fails in this he 
will coax him to preach poorly. There 
is nothing that the powers of darkness 
fear and hate like the light which bursts 
from a genuinely Christian sermon. The 
world is filled with voices pleading with 
men not to preach. They say that the 
days for preaching are gone forever, that 
the printing-press has come, that society 
does not need instruction or guidance 
from the pulpit, for other teachers have 
arisen to fill the preacher's place. But 
to all such voices let our answer be, 
The printing-press is lifeless, it is made 
of iron and steel, and nothing without 
a throbbing heart can soothe and heal 
the hearts of men. So long as hearts 
are human, and so long as tongues know 
how to speak, the hungry heart will 
listen to a tongue which has learned the 



The Dimensions of the Work 33 

story of Jesus and his love. The day 
of preaching has not gone ; it has only 
fairly begun. The great days of the 
pulpit are in front of us, and the world 
is groaning and travailing in pain together 
until now, waiting for the coming of new 
sons of pulpit power. 

The world keeps twitting the minister 
on the loss of his professional prestige. 
He is no longer on a pedestal. He is 
not now the most conspicuous personage 
in all the town. And to all this the 
answer is, What of it ? He never be- 
longed upon a pedestal. That was not 
his place. The world gave and the world 
has taken away, and the minister is where 
he was at the beginning, — a servant of the 
Lord. Jesus was not on a pedestal, and 
it is enough for the disciple to be as his 
Master and the servant as his Lord. No 
man looms up to-day in any of the king- 
doms of life as men loomed several dec- 
ades ago. There is no statesman so 
conspicuous as Daniel Webster, no editor 



34 The Minister as Prophet 

so famous as Horace Greeley, no mer- 
chant so much talked of as A. T. 
Stewart, and nowhere in the world is 
there a teacher who has the reputation 
once possessed by Gamaliel. 

But to be conspicuous is not so great as 
to be useful, and has the time now arrived 
when the minister can be of no service 
to men ? Is no one needed to comfort 
women in the agony over the grave of 
their first born, to encourage men who, 
harassed by business cares, know not how 
to endure, to strengthen young men who 
are fighting with passions fiercer than the 
beasts of Ephesus, and to brace the 
trembling hearts of those who are pass- 
ing into the valley where the deep shad- 
ows lie ? What right has a minister to 
covet a pedestal ? Let him stand on the 
ground by the side of his brethren ! 

Listen not to the world and listen not 
to the despondent voices of your own 
discouraged heart. Often you will be 
tempted to accept the view that men are 



The Dimensions of the Work 35 

little more than animals, and that the 
prevailing forces in their life are sordid 
and materialistic. There are eloquent 
descriptions of the world representing it 
as a world in which faith is dying and 
aspiration dead, inhabited by men who 
have lost out of their hearts the hopes 
of nobler times and who are asphyxiated 
in an atmosphere filled with spiritual 
poison. The man who doubts the dig- 
nity and divinity of human nature cannot 
preach. Banish every doubt concerning 
man as you would banish doubt concern- 
ing God. Meet men always on high 
ground. Speak to them as though they 
were indeed the sons of God. Have 
faith in God, and also have faith in man. 
Go out to meet men on the lofty levels on 
which Jesus walked in the upper cham- 
ber and in the sermon on the mount, and 
you will never lack an audience, and 
never speak in vain. 

Pay no attention to your heart when it 
mourns over the fact that there are no 



36 The Minister as Prophet 

results. Appearances are usually de- 
ceiving, and never so deceiving as in the 
field in which the preacher does his 
work. Little is said about sermons to 
the preacher. Few of his parishioners 
ever take the trouble to thank him for 
any of his sermonic work. They come, 
listen, and go home, silent on the sermon 
and on what it has accomplished for their 
soul. Moreover, the results cannot easily 
be seen. The preacher strains his eyes to 
find them, but they are invisible. Men 
seem to remain just what they were in 
spite of all his labor. But a minister 
should walk by faith and not by sight. If 
men do not praise him for his sermons, let 
him seek the honor which comes from 
God only. If he cannot see the results 
of his work, let him remember that spir- 
itual harvests are slow in coming, and 
that his will grow golden in some far-off 
autumn sun. 

Lyman Beecher, preaching on the sov- 
ereignty of God, did not know that 



The Dimensions of the Work 37 

young Wendell Phillips was in his con- 
gregation ; nor did he know that after 
the benediction Wendell Phillips hurried 
to his room, threw himself on his knees, 
and dedicated himself for life to the ser- 
vice of the King. Newman Hall did not 
know that during one of his sermons a 
poor, obscure seamstress was converted 
by his words. It was at the end of twenty 
years that she sent him a bouquet as a 
token of gratitude for the peace of God 
which had come to her through him. The 
humble preacher in Ecclefechan never 
dreamed that little Tommy Carlyle would 
some day be one of England's foremost 
men of letters, and would say, referring to 
the early sermons, " The mark of that 
man is on me ! " No man ever knows 
what he is accomplishing when he works 
with ideas and human souls. It is enough 
to know that he who works with truth and 
life never works without results, and that 
he who works with God works with one 
who has said, " My word shall not re- 



38 The Minister as Prophet 

turn unto me void, but it shall accomplish 
that which I please, and it shall prosper 
in the thing whereto I sent it." 

Be of good cheer, therefore, and re- 
member you stand in the line of a great 
succession. Think often of the giants 
who have preceded you in this work. 
Read what they did, and revel in their 
triumphs. Surrounded by so great a 
cloud of witnesses who have received 
their crowns, you will offer a more stead- 
fast testimony and abound in the work of 
the Lord till the end of the day. It is 
well to remember also the saying of a 
Puritan preacher, Thomas Goodwin, " God 
had only one son, and he made him a 
minister." 



II 

The Three Men Involved 

It takes three men to preach a sermon, 
— the physical man, the mental man, and 
the spiritual man. Let us give these 
three men our attention. 

i. The Physical Man. We are just 
beginning to understand the body. It is 
dawning upon us that it is really a part 
of man, not an adjunct or an after- 
thought, but an integral part of his 
being. The mediaeval conception of the 
flesh has dominated the world almost 
to the present generation. In theory we 
threw that conception away long ago, but 
much of our thinking and more of our 
practice have been unconsciously colored 
and molded by it. Many a man even 
in our day has acted in student days and 
39 



40 The Minister as Prophet 

afterward as though he were a spirit only, 
and had no body to which any thought 
was due. But we are coming to see that 
the body is no less divine than the soul, 
and that without a body man is not man, 
either in this world or in any other. He 
is not body alone, neither is he soul only, 
but he is soul and body ; the two together 
make the man. Without the body the 
soul can do nothing on this earth, and 
therefore the study of the body and the 
care for its development are as indispensa- 
ble in every rational system of education 
as is attention devoted to the soul. A 
minister cannot preach without his body, 
and, other things being equal, the sounder 
his body, the more effective will be his 
preaching. 

Indeed, the body is more implicated in 
the work of the preacher than in the work 
of many a man who seems to use his body 
only. A minister is subjected to a nervous 
strain which is continuous, and which at 
times becomes terrific. Heavy weights 



The Three Men Involved 41 

hang on all his nerve centers. As an ad- 
ministrator he is called upon to do work 
which is taxing to a degree. It is easy to 
work with sticks and stones, for they are 
without life and will stay where they are 
put. It is easy to work with shrubs and 
flowers, for having no emotions of their 
own they do not lose their temper or come 
into conflict with those who strive to train 
them. Shrubs and flowers, however, have 
life, and having life they have habits and 
inclinations, and therefore the horticulturist 
has more to think about and watch, and 
meets with greater disappointments than 
the man who works with matter which is 
dead. 

When one works with animals a greater 
degree of attention is required, for in 
animals there are emotions and passions, 
and these are constantly coming into col- 
lision with the will of those who would 
manage them. It requires a greater alert- 
ness of mind and a firmer patience to deal 
with oxen, horses, mules, than are required 



42 The Minister as Prophet 

in the successful management of trees and 
flowers. But when we come to human 
beings, we find life in all its fullness, with 
appetites, passions, dispositions, inclina- 
tions, and a will which must be trained to 
work in harmony with other wills. The 
crudenesses and limitations and perversi- 
ties of human nature are incalculable, and 
to keep several hundred men and women 
in one household of faith living and work- 
ing harmoniously together requires an 
alertness, a resourcefulness, and a patience 
which often leave the heart fatigued. 

But this is not more exhausting than is 
the work of the pastor. A minister has with 
him always the poor, the sick, the bereaved, 
the dying, the forlorn, and broken. None 
of these is it possible for him to escape. 
He must bear their burdens on his heart 
He must touch them, and every time he 
touches them strength goes from him. To 
be a successful preacher a man must be 
finely organized, but no man can have a 
sensitive organization without responding 



The Three Men Involved 43 

to the want and woe of the people whose 
lives are pressed close against his own. A 
half hour in the sick chamber may be 
more exhausting than ten hours of manual 
labor, and one funeral may leave a man 
sapped and jaded for a day. Men who 
think the minister has an easy life do not 
know what it is to be a pastor. His work 
as priest is by no means easy. To carry a 
congregation to the throne of grace is one 
of the most taxing of all labors to any man 
who realizes what public worship really is. 
There is not a moment in the service 
when a true priest's heart is not radiating 
life and heat, and with some men the out- 
flow of vitality through scripture reading 
and extemporaneous prayer is so tremen- 
dous that they are well-nigh exhausted be- 
fore the time for preaching has arrived. To 
conduct public worship as public worship 
ought to be conducted is a joy which only 
the redeemed can know, but it is a joy 
which must be paid for with blood. In 
his outside work as patriot and citizen the 



44 The Minister as Prophet 

engagements are numerous and the bur- 
dens are heavy. The minister must on 
many occasions voice the sentiments and 
convictions of the public, and whenever he 
speaks he must speak in such a way as to 
do justice to himself and honor to those 
whose spokesman he is. 

But it is in the work of preaching that 
we come to the heaviest tax and the 
severest strain on all the centers of 
vitality. The preacher is a student, and 
as a student he must work continuously 
and intently through a stated number of 
hours each day. But he is more than 
student ; he is writer, and must write 
incessantly if he is to maintain a clear 
and forceful style. In addition to all this 
he is a speaker, and must have such life 
and grip that he can grasp a congrega- 
tion and hold it to the end. In successful 
public speaking the mind becomes abnor- 
mally awake, every nerve is stretched to 
its utmost, and an added strain is laid 
upon the heart. Only a man strong in 



The Three Men Involved 45 

body can bear a load so heavy through a 
term of years. First the stomach suc- 
cumbs, then the nerves fail, then the voice 
grows flabby, the sword with which the 
preacher must do his work thus losing its 
edge, and his power over a congregation 
being hopelessly broken. This is the ex- 
perience of hundreds, and other hundreds 
escape physical wreck only by lessening 
the tension and doing their work in half- 
hearted ways. 

Let me beseech you, therefore, to take 
care of your body. It is difficult for any 
man under forty to do this; after forty 
we begin to be sorry for the sins of neg- 
lect in our youth. The laws of health 
are simple, and may be easily stated, how- 
ever difficult it may be to obey them. 

First of all you must have an abun- 
dance of fresh air. Men are like plants 
and cannot live without air. You should 
study in a L room well ventilated, the win- 
dows being open as much as possible, and 
the lungs being filled now and then with 



46 The Minister as Prophet 

brief seasons devoted to deep breathing. 
Many a man thinks himself stupid or the 
book difficult to read because he is being 
slowly poisoned by carbonic acid gas. 
And what is good by day is good also by 
night. A current of fresh air ought to 
flow through your bedroom. You can- 
not breathe poison all night and have a 
mind fresh for work in the morning. 
Never cease to value the virtue of the 
air of God's great out of doors. People 
catch cold not because they have too 
much fresh air, but because they have too 
little. 

Good health is largely a problem of 
eating. Food is fuel, and the body like 
all engines must have fuel. You are to 
run your engine at high pressure and 
through long distances, and therefore you 
must have an abundance of fuel. Eat 
abundantly. Eat all you need. Let no 
rules of the books keep you from eating 
as much as the body demands. I have 
known more than one student to be 



The Three Men Involved 47 

broken down because he did not eat 
enough. But do not eat too much. 
Most people do. Many ministers do. 
Over-eating is the prolific cause of in- 
numerable diseases, and we are undoubt- 
edly the most overfed nation on earth. 
To eat more than the system demands is 
to break down the machinery of the body, 
and store up trouble for years to come. 
Eat little in the morning, for you cannot 
fill the stomach with a huge breakfast 
and then have enough blood in your 
brain to do successful mental work. The 
students of all lands have learned by ex- 
perience that to study in the morning the 
breakfast must be light. And this is true, 
even on Sunday morning, notwithstand- 
ing the hard work of the service. The 
meal on Saturday night should be so 
abundant that a light breakfast Sunday 
morning shall be sufficient for one's needs. 
Public speaking requires all the blood 
which the heart can supply, and if one 
has it in his stomach digesting his break- 



48 The Minister as Prophet 

fast, it will not burn in his voice or throb 
in his words. 

Take an abundance of exercise, but do 
not take too much. Hard brain workers 
require only exercise that is gentle. If 
you are pouring out your vitality in men- 
tal activity, you must not pour it out also 
in bodily exertion. There is such a thing 
as burning the candle at both ends, and 
many a man working hard with his head 
has supposed he must recuperate by work- 
ing hard with his body, the result being 
complete bodily and mental exhaustion. 
Let your exercise be gentle and regular 
and as often as possible in the open air. 

Along with the air and the food and 
the exercise you must take an abundance 
of rest. If you are to be hard workers, 
you must learn the art of recuperation. 
Since you are always breaking yourself 
down, you must learn how constantly to 
build yourself up. God has provided a 
daily rest in sleep. Take all the sleep 
you need. No book can tell you how much 



The Three Men Involved 49 

this is. It may be four hours, or six, or 
eight, but whatever the amount is you 
must take it, and he who does not take it, 
refuses at his peril. There are some sins 
which the nervous system refuses to par- 
don, and one of these is throwing away 
sleep. God has provided a weekly rest 
in the Sabbath. One day in seven is to 
be devoted to rest. It matters not what 
the day is, but it must be one day in 
seven. The Jews begin counting at one 
point, the Christians begin at another, 
the preacher must begin at still another, 
for on the day when his congregation is 
resting he must do some of his most 
strenuous work. 

There is no commandment in the 
decalogue so easily forgotten as the 
fourth. Moses knew this and so began 
it with the solemn, " Remember." It is 
a commandment more disregarded by 
ministers than by any other class of 
believers. Many a minister does not 
know that the commandment is for him 



50 The Minister as Prophet 

at all. He knows it is for others, but 
imagines that if he is doing good, God 
will forgive him for doing wrong. That 
is a big, black lie ! Many a dear saint 
has been broken all to pieces by such 
foolish reasoning and reckless conduct. 
God is no respecter of persons, and every 
one upon whom his law falls is ground to 
powder. 

The same sort of temptation came 
to Jesus. The devil told him he could 
jump from one of the pinnacles of the 
temple down into the street, and that no 
harm would come to him because there 
was a verse of scripture saying : " He 
shall give his angels charge concerning 
thee : and in their hands they shall bear 
thee up lest at any time thou dash thy 
foot against a stone. " But the Son of 
Man could not be hoodwinked. Quick 
as a flash his reply was, " Thou shalt 
not tempt the Lord thy God." That is 
what ministers are doing when they do 
not rest one day in seven ; they are 



The Three Men Involved 51 

tempting God. They jump from the 
pinnacle to the street and are bruised 
and broken. Many ministers do not 
observe any rest day at all, and those 
who do usually choose Monday. The 
reason for their choice is that they are 
exhausted after the work of Sunday, and 
being " blue " they do not attempt to 
work. In my opinion Saturday, not Mon- 
day, ought to be the preacher's day of 
rest. If he has a blue Monday, it is be- 
cause there is something wrong in his 
way of living. 

No man in fair bodily health ought 
to be completely exhausted by preach- 
ing two sermons on Sunday. The rea- 
son for the exhaustion is in many cases 
because the minister comes to his ser- 
mon with only the fag ends of his 
strength. He has probably postponed 
the writing of his sermon till Friday or 
Saturday. He then plunges into it with 
desperation and fury. He works on it 
all day Saturday and perhaps late Satur- 



52 The Minister as Prophet 

day night, and possibly into Sunday 
morning. After a few hours' sleep he 
goes to work again, toiling up to the 
very hour for his appearance in the pul- 
pit. He is already an exhausted man, 
but in the excitement of the hour he for- 
gets it. He works on his nerves. He 
calls out all his reserves. The fountains 
of life are well-nigh exhausted, and he 
draws out of them their last drop. When 
the day is over he wonders whether life 
is worth living, and on the morrow he is 
blue because on the verge of nervous 
collapse. 

A blue Monday is a danger signal 
which the Lord hangs out to warn his 
ministers of coming disaster. A man 
should come to his pulpit fresh, with 
nerves full of life and all his blood leap- 
ing through his veins. He should do but 
little mental work on Saturday, spending 
Saturday afternoon in the open air. His 
Saturday evening meal should be the best 
and most elaborate meal of all the week. 



The Three Men Involved 53 

The evening should be spent with his 
family or with friends, in a room warm 
with social cheer, in order that he may- 
fall in love again with human beings. 
Saturday night bed-time should be the 
earliest of the week, and after a good 
night's sleep he will awake, brood over 
the sermon which he has prepared, and 
the truth will so burn in him and the 
tides of life will so rise and roll as to 
render him almost beside himself with 
impatience, so eager will he be to give 
utterance to his message. In these 
hurried times when congregations are 
likely to be made up of fagged and jaded 
men and women, there is special reason 
why the man in the pulpit should be 
physically recuperated and overflowingly 
vital. 

But the weekly rest is not enough. 
There must be an annual rest. Every 
minister should have a vacation, longer 
or shorter, every year. It does not mat- 
ter in what season, it is only important 



54 The Minister as Prophet 

that it should come. There is much 
routine in ministerial work, and routine, 
if too long continued, is ruinous to the 
action of the highest powers of the 
soul. There is a monotony which unless 
broken leads down to the chambers of 
death. A man cannot prepare two ser- 
mons, and then two more, and then two 
more, and then two more, and keep on 
doing that week after week, month after 
month, year after year, without a break, 
or a chance to get out of the treadmill and 
lie down for a while in God's fields. The 
land from which you expect rich harvests 
must be allowed to lie fallow, and if a min- 
ister does not break the routine of ser- 
monic work, the routine will most certainly 
break him. He will become mechanical, 
perfunctory, professional, and will cease 
to be vital and human. 

Take a vacation every year. If your 
people do not consent, take it anyhow. 
No minister is called upon to sacrifice his 
usefulness because of the demands of 



The Three Men Involved 55 

ignorant and unreasonable people. If 
they remind you that the devil never 
takes a vacation, say to them that that 
is the very reason you are bound to take 
one, since you are not following the devil, 
but the prince of preachers who was 
wont to say to those who labored for him, 
" Come apart and rest awhile." 

2. The Mental Man. No matter how 
fine the physique, something besides body 
is essential for the production of sermons. 
There is a mental man inside the physical 
man whose assistance is indispensable, and 
whose health and growth must be care- 
fully safeguarded. A minister must give 
constant attention to the making of his 
mind. Its muscles must be developed ; its 
nerves must be kept full of blood. The 
preacher is a teacher, and how can a 
teacher teach unless he knows, and how 
can he know unless he uses all his faculties 
of acquisition and retention ? His memory 
must be finely disciplined. Without it he 
is pouring wine into a sieve. His imagina- 



56 The Minister as Prophet 

tion must be alive. He must see in order 
that he may paint. The power of organ- 
izing thought must be built up and dis- 
ciplined, for it is his business to weld the 
links of argument and appeal into a chain 
which shall be strong enough to bind 
men's hearts and minds around the cross 
of Christ. 

There are two kinds of preachers, — men 
of thoughts and men of thought. The 
man of thoughts keeps all sorts of books 
of illustrations, and drawers filled with 
clippings, and envelopes stuffed with 
bright ideas, and when the time comes for 
the making of the sermon, he brings out 
of his treasury things new and old, placing 
the thoughts in a certain sequence, like so 
many glass beads on a string, the string 
being divided into sections by an occa- 
sional big blue bead, this bead being an 
illustration. Such a man brings his beads 
before the congregation, counts them over, 
spends thirty minutes in doing it, and the 
people go home thinking they have been 



The Three Men Involved 57 

listening to a sermon. But in a deep sense 
that performance is not a sermon at all. 
Reciting a string of thoughts is not, strictly 
speaking, preaching. 

Preaching is the unfolding of truth ; 
it is the evolution of an idea. One idea 
is sufficient to make a powerful sermon. 
A man who can take a great idea and 
by sheer force of brain unfold it until 
it glows and hangs glorious before the 
eyes of men, and so burns that hard 
hearts melt and consciences awake and 
begin to tremble, is a preacher indeed, 
and actually performs the work of the 
Lord. But the little dabbler in other 
men's thoughts, who fills up his time with 
second-hand anecdotes and stale stories, 
and tales intended to make people cry, 
never gets down to the place where the 
soul lives, and does not know either the 
preacher's agony or his reward. A con- 
gregation knows when it is in the hands 
of a man who is a thinker ; and it 
also knows when it is listening to a 



58 The Minister as Prophet 

man who is a retailer of other men's 
ideas. 

A sermon is a rose. The text is the 
bud, and the preacher, breathing on the 
bud, causes the folded petals to open on 
the air and fill with fragrance the place 
where the saints of God are sitting. Go 
to the bee, young preacher ; consider her 
ways and be wise. Where does the bee 
get her honey? You say out of the flowers. 
You are mistaken. There is no honey in 
the flowers. You cannot get an ounce of 
honey out of a hundred fields of flowers. 
Open a flower and there is no honey in it ; 
only a little sweetened water. But the bee 
takes the sweetened water, squeezes into 
it a drop of her own secretion, makes to it 
a personal contribution, and lo ! the sweet- 
ened water becomes honey. The bee did 
it by personal work. And so must you. 
All the flowers of speech and the illustra- 
tions and the anecdotes and the stories 
are so many posies containing nothing but 
a little sweetened water. You cannot feed 



The Three Men Involved 59 

an audience of adults on water even though 
it is sweetened. You can feed men only 
on thought, and you must do the thinking. 
To whatever you find you must make your 
own individual and personal contribution. 
It is only as you put your own heart and 
brain into your sermons that they become 
sweet as honey and the honeycomb. 

Go to the spider, young preacher, and 
get from it a lesson in preaching. The 
spider does not weave its web out of mate- 
rial which is gathered from the field or the 
house, but the web is spun out of the sub- 
stance of the spider itself. That delicate 
and artistic creation, the spider's web, is 
too fine to be made of the rough stuff of 
the streets. Those gossamer threads are 
woven out of the stuff of which the spider 
is made, and its miracle becomes possible 
only by the forthgiving of the spider's own 
life. If you would catch and hold the 
hearts of men, you must weave your ser- 
mons out of the very substance of your 
soul. It is not the material which other 



6o The Minister as Prophet 

men have gathered and organized, but the 
stuff of your own spiritual self which is 
demanded by the people who think. Your 
personal contribution is everything. You 
must pour into your sermon your own 
heart's blood. Let me give you a new 
definition of sermons ; they are drops of 
blood shed by the servants of the Lord for 
the redemption of the world. More will 
be said of the mental man when we come 
to consider the growing of sermons. 

3. The Spiritual Man. Man is an ani- 
mal, but an animal cannot preach. He 
is an intellectual being, but an intellectual 
being cannot preach. He is a being cre- 
ated in the image of God, and endowed 
with the divine spirit. Without the spirit 
of God, no man, no matter what his physi- 
cal prowess or his intellectual ability, can 
successfully proclaim the good news of 
God in Christ. It is easy to forget this. 
Many men do forget it. They cannot 
understand either themselves or others 
because they drop out the fact that with- 



The Three Men Involved 6r 

out the Holy Spirit no man can speak suc- 
cessfully for God. A man may say : " I 
have a diploma. I completed the course 
of study. I was one of the best men in 
my class. But no one wants to hear me 
preach! Why is this?" You have left 
out the one thing indispensable, — the Holy 
Spirit. It is not uncommon for unsuccess- 
ful preachers to compare themselves with 
their successful brethren, and try to ascer- 
tain why some succeed and others fail. 
Their comparisons are pathetic to the 
verge of tragedy. They compare their 
own ideas, their figures, and their language 
with those adopted by successful men, and 
falling behind no whit, as they think, in 
all these points, they feel the world has 
much abused them, and that if the public 
were not so stupid and so blind, they would 
all find themselves in pulpit thrones. 

O foolish men, do you not know that it is 
not by rhetorical might, neither by scholas- 
tic power, but by the spirit of the Lord 
that a preacher preaches ? It is surprising 



62 The Minister as Prophet 

how little depends on structure and orna- 
ment and how much depends on the spirit. 
Peter's sermon on the day of Pentecost 
seems meager and tame enough, but then 
it was impossible for Luke to report that 
sermon, for he could not report the spirit 
of God. The sermons of Spurgeon sound 
cold and commonplace as we read them in 
his volumes, and the sermons of Beecher 
seem repetitious and prolix. But it is im- 
possible to print a sermon. The most 
fully reported sermon is nothing but a 
skeleton. The life of the sermon lies in 
the tones and accents, in the subtle fire 
that burns in the syllables, and the spirit- 
ual heat which radiates from the man him- 
self. A sermon is a man, and you cannot 
print a man. 

It is commonplace to say that a 
preacher must have the Holy Spirit, but 
it is a commonplace which every preacher 
will do well to ponder. By Holy Spirit is 
meant not some indefinable and mysteri- 
ous essence, but the spirit that belongs to 



The Three Men Involved 63 

a whole-hearted, full-statured man. The 
preacher must be sincere. This is car- 
dinal. Without sincerity he is a clanging 
cymbal. He must not put on. Pretense 
is abominable. A sham tone is nauseating. 
Every tone should be natural and honest. 
The man who talks in one tone in the 
street and in another tone in the pulpit is 
a man who needs to mend his ways. Nor 
should he put on robes of gorgeous lan- 
guage, speaking in a style which is not his 
own. If he has read fine literature until 
an elegant and superb style is sponta- 
neous and habitual, let him use it ; but let 
him not put on a splendid diction which 
does not fit the form and habit of his 
mind. A rhetorical drum-major is not 
a man to lead reverent souls into the 
presence of the eternal. Nor should he 
put on energy and passion when his 
thought calls for neither. Why make 
thunder tones over an idea which is puny ? 
A speaker, to be effective, must be sin- 
cere. He must also be cheerful. The 



64 The Minister as Prophet 

Gospel is good news. The New Testa- 
ment opens with a burst of music and 
closes with another. The Master, in the 
shadow of the cross, said, " Be of good 
cheer," and to the hard-pressed Christians 
of the first century St. James's exhortation 
was, " Count it all joy, brethren, when ye 
fall into divers trials." Paul, even in a 
Roman prison, could write, " Rejoice, 
again I say, rejoice." The New Testa- 
ment narrates the most tragic story known 
to history, but is at the same time the 
most jubilant book in all the world. The 
minister who has a glum face and a dole- 
ful spirit is a man from whom the Holy 
Spirit has departed. He must also be a 
man of hope. The golden age must lie 
before him. 

The Hebrew prophets were unlike in 
much, but in seeing bright things com- 
ing they were all agreed. No matter 
how dark and dismal was the picture 
which they painted of the world in which 
they lived, they never laid down their 



The Three Men Involved 65 

brush till they had tinged the horizon 
with golden fire. No man has a right to 
call attention to the terrible and tragic 
features of his time unless he at the same 
time points to the deepening splendor of a 
great glory bursting in the East. Some- 
time, somewhere, the prophets said, the 
city of the Lord shall be established, and 
its glory shall go forth into all the earth. 
It is significant that St. Paul calls hope 
the helmet of the armor which a Christian 
man is bound to wear. Unless a man can 
hold his head up, he cannot work and he 
cannot fight. Unless a preacher can hold 
up his head, he cannot preach the Gospel 
in tones which smite and conquer. Being 
a man of hope, the preacher will be a man 
of courage. Where is heroism more needed 
than in the Christian ministry ? 

No man should put his hand to the plow 
unless he is determined not to look back, 
no matter what his hardships be. There 
are obstacles and disappointments all the 
way. It is hard to get an education, but 



66 The Minister as Prophet 

it is no harder for theological students 
than for others. It is hard sometimes to 
find a place in which to work, but so also 
it is hard for lawyers and doctors and 
editors to get a start. It is hard to se- 
cure a salary at all in keeping with one's 
deserts, but many a young man fitting 
himself for a business career is to-day 
down at the bottom, working for four or 
five dollars a week. It is hard not to be 
appreciated, and few ministers get credit 
for being as able men as they are. The 
very frequency of their appearance before 
the people takes away the charm of nov- 
elty and the possibility of originality, 
and makes even industrious and able 
men seem ordinary and commonplace. 
But preachers are not the only unappre- 
ciated men in this world. It is hard to 
be ignored, and it is hard to be gossiped 
about and misunderstood, but this has 
been the fate of every man who has 
helped make the world a better place in 
which to live. 



The Three Men Involved 6? 

It is hard — yes, it is hard, and the 
man who wants something easy is not 
called to preach the Gospel. A coward 
cannot read the scriptures in a tone 
which will fire the hearts of men, and a 
preacher with a whine in his soul is a 
preacher whose usefulness is gone. Men 
who are everlastingly whimpering because 
of their misfortunes and trials can never 
lift men into the joy of the Gospel ; for, if 
one is to keep his people on the sunny 
side of the street, he must walk on the 
sunny side of the street himself. When 
Jesus called twelve men to preach his 
Gospel, he did not promise them easy 
times. He told them they would be like 
so many sheep in the midst of wolves, 
and though obliged to face hatred, suffer- 
ing, and death, they were not to be dis- 
concerted or afraid. He dipped his brush 
in "hues of midnight and eclipse," and 
painted dangers, sufferings, and fire-eyed 
opposition ; but his apostles, looking on it 
all, never winced or faltered, and went 



68 The Minister as Prophet 

bravely forward to do the work appointed 
for them to do. To read the tenth chapter 
of St. Matthew's gospel gives one an ex- 
alted notion of the kind of stuff out of 
which these twelve men were made. No 
wonder they turned the world upside 
down ! They were to face the deadliest 
perils, and they were also to endure. In 
their patience they were to save their 
souls. 

Patience is endurance. The success- 
ful minister has mastered the secret of 
enduring. When William Pitt was asked 
the quality most needed in a man fit to 
be prime minister of England, his reply 
was, " Patience.' ' When asked what 
quality stood second, his reply was, " Pa- 
tience." When pressed to tell what req- 
uisite was next, his reply still was, 
" Patience." All ministers need patience, 
whether ministers of an earthly sovereign 
or servants of the Heavenly King. One 
cannot work successfully with men in 
enterprises that are critical and vast unless 



The Three Men Involved 69 

he has the grace of holding on. No delay- 
should daunt him and no disappointment 
should break him down. After every 
defeat he should rise again, and from 
every slough he should emerge with a 
face radiant with the expectation of vic- 
tory. 

One of the besetting sins of our age is 
impatience. We move more rapidly than 
any generation before us, and our ambition 
is to move faster still. In the world of me- 
chanics and machinery, we can do every- 
thing more expeditiously than our fathers 
could. We can travel faster by rail and 
sail faster on the sea. We can make 
money faster, and also lose it faster, than 
any of our predecessors. We can manu- 
facture goods faster and put up buildings 
with a rapidity worthy of the magicians of 
the olden tales ; and, because we can do 
many things so swiftly, we are impatient 
that we cannot with equal dash do every- 
thing that we want to do. But alas ! the 
processes of growth cannot be hastened, 



JO The Minister as Prophet 

and when it comes to growing crops in 
the field or raising harvests in the mind, 
we are bound by the same old tedious 
laws by which the world was bound a 
thousand years ago. Wheat grows no 
more rapidly now than in the days of 
Herodotus, and the Indian corn requires 
no fewer days to ripen than it did when 
the Indians and our fathers lived side by 
side on this New England soil. Boys 
need the appointed years to grow to man- 
hood and girls to grow to womanhood, and 
a soul can be converted or sanctified no 
more swiftly now than in the days when 
Christianity was young. No man becomes 
a saint in a day or a night, and sermons, 
however true and God-inspired, bring 
forth harvests only at the end of many 
days. 

It is important, therefore, that the young 
minister should have patience, that he 
should school himself to it, and should 
pray unceasingly that more and more he 
may become willing to wait upon the 



The Three Men Involved Ji 

Lord. If he allows himself to become 
feverish and fussy, this ungodly disposi- 
tion will show itself in all his pulpit work. 
The servant of the Lord should have a 
calm eye and an untroubled heart if he 
is to do successfully the great work of 
the King. It is the man with high ideals 
and strenuous spirit who is most likely 
to become soonest disgusted with the 
sluggishness of the average parish; and 
unless he holds himself in check, he will 
not only infuse into his sermons a heated 
and a captious spirit, but he will write 
out his resignation before his work is well 
begun. 

One of the curses of the modern church 
is the shortness of the average pastorate. 
Our ministers are degenerating into a 
band of nomads, and they wander from 
place to place in search of pastures which 
are green. Not only do the preachers 
lose, but the whole church of God suffers. 
A man cannot test himself and show what 
is really in him unless he has been in a 



72 The Minister as Prophet 

church for several years, and the best and 
most lasting work is never done until suffi- 
cient time has elapsed for the people to 
know the pastor and the pastor to know 
the people. It requires years for the 
heart-doors to be opened, and it is only 
after they are open that the word of God 
runs and is glorified. 

I wish that every young man might 
make up his mind to stay with his first 
church at least five years unless circum- 
stances extraordinary render so long a 
stay impracticable, and that after the 
first term of service no pastorate of less 
than ten years' duration might be counted 
worthy of a minister or a church. It is 
as the years increase that a minister's 
influence spreads and deepens in ways 
which are amazing. Only after the pa- 
tient laying of deep foundations is it 
possible for the man of God to know what 
sort of structure it is possible for him to 
build. The man who flits from place to 
place is almost sure to give but surface 



The Three Men Involved 73 

truths, and whatever impression he may 
make is quickly washed away; whereas, 
the man who stays in one field year after 
year draws from a well that is deep and 
that grows constantly deeper, and it is 
from the deep wells of the minister's heart 
that the best and most refreshing sermons 
flow. One of the greatest pulpit princes 
of recent times is Alexander Maclaren of 
Manchester. At the celebration of the 
thirty-eighth anniversary of his pastorate, 
he uttered these significant words, " I am 
quite sure that a man's influence increases 
in geometric ratio with the length of his 
pastorate." He would never have found 
that out had he not been a man of pa- 
tience. 

These then are the three men by whose 
combined effort you are to preach. The 
physical man must be strong: the mental 
man must be alert : the spiritual man must 
be true. It is the man rather than the 
sermon which makes the impression, and 
no matter what you say, you may be 



74 The Minister as Prophet 

impotent in your work if the man behind 
the sermon is thin or vain or insincere. 
There is warning in the words of Emerson, 
" What you are speaks so loud I cannot 
hear what you say." 



Ill 

The Growing of Sermons 

The usual expression is " making " a 
sermon, or " getting up " a sermon, but the 
" growing " of a sermon is preferable. 
For in a very true sense you can no more 
" make " a sermon than you can "make" an 
ear of corn, and you can no more " get up " 
a sermon than you can " get up " a lily of 
the valley. A sermon in the highest sense 
is a growth rather than a manufactured 
product, an organism and not a thing that 
is made. You may make something and 
call it a sermon — a verbal thing thirty 
minutes long, but a verbal creation is not 
necessarily a sermon even though you give 
it that name. 

A pulpit discourse may be manufac- 
tured just as a piece of furniture. A 
man who makes a table picks out his 
75 



j6 The Minister as Prophet 

pieces of wood, saws them, planes them, 
puts them together, and the article thus 
constructed is sandpapered, painted, and 
varnished. In the same mechanical man- 
ner it is possible to work in the study. A 
minister may bring out his materials, put 
in a piece of exegesis, add a piece of 
doctrine, tack on a piece of illustration, 
and then a piece of exhortation, and these 
having been nicely fitted together, he may 
sandpaper them and varnish them, and 
the whole thing polished and labeled may 
be carried before a congregation and 
called a sermon, but a sermon in reality 
it is not. It is too wooden. It is dead, 
and a sermon is always alive. A sermon 
grows as an apple grows, and what it needs 
is sun and time. You may pick it green if 
you are in a hurry, and if you do, it will set 
your people's teeth on edge. You may 
pick it half ripe and lose something of the 
flavor, or you may wait till it becomes 
mellow, rich, and juicy, and then the saints 
are glad. 



The Growing of Sermons 77 

A genuine sermon is an organism, a 
living thing with all its parts organically 
connected, and when you throw it out 
upon a congregation, it becomes a living 
creature with hands and feet, and immedi- 
ately goes to work and takes hold of men, 
lifting them out of despondencies and 
dungeons and setting them to travel along 
ways that are new. It will be well for us 
to consider the conditions under which 
sermons best grow. 

If a man is to produce good sermons 
straight onward through the years, he must 
be the most indefatigable of all toilers. 
The cardinal virtue of a prophet of God 
is industry. Many men do not know what 
work is. Some of them think they know, 
but they are mistaken. Many a man 
imagines he is working hard when in fact 
he is a dawdler and a shirk. Some men 
seem busier than they are, and not a few 
would rather do anything else than think. 

Men are naturally intellectually lazy. 
This is true of all men and not at all pecul- 



78 The Minister as Prophet 

iar to the clergy. The average human 
being wherever he is found shrinks from 
any task which requires close and continu- 
ous attention, and which lays a tax upon the 
mind. It is not because ministers are 
lazier than other men that I dwell upon 
their indolence, but because laziness is 
more disastrous in their case than in any 
other. Their sin finds them out and their 
shame is shouted from the housetops. 
The work of growing sermons requires a 
more strenuous forthputting of more dif- 
ferent faculties of the mind than is nec- 
essary in any other calling, and if one is not 
capable of sustained intellectual effort and 
not willing to exert his mind in season and 
out of season, let him never think himself 
called by God to preach. 

If the clergyman has in his system any 
germs of mental sloth, let him watch and 
pray, for no other man in all the town 
has better opportunities to take life easy. 
Most men go to work under bosses who 
hold their watch in their hand. The work- 



The Growing of Sermons 79 

man who does not appear promptly on 
time is reprimanded and docked. The 
minister works under one who also holds 
a watch in his hand, but both watch and 
overseer are invisible, and therefore are 
readily forgotten. A man who will take 
advantage of his people simply because 
the door is shut and he cannot be seen 
is a deep-dyed scamp, even if he has been 
ordained and writes Reverend in front of 
his name. But a minister can be intel- 
lectually lazy and still be so busied with 
parochial affairs as to feel he is earning 
his salary, and not realize how lazy he is. 
The head of a church can do chores 
and run errands, and talk with good peo- 
ple in the streets and in their homes, 
and spend a deal of time inspecting the 
wheels and mending the belts of the ec- 
clesiastical machinery, but all this requires 
little mental effort, and that is why many 
men prefer to do it. If a man is to be a 
preacher, he cannot fill up his days with 
the odds and ends of church administra- 



80 The Minister as PropJiet 

tion, but must set himself down to do 
some honest and straightforward think- 
ing. 

Some men are tempted to be lazy be- 
cause intellectually their people are so 
common. Their congregation reads little 
and thinks less, and the minister, know- 
ing this, has no incentive to put thought 
into his sermons, and feels that any expo- 
sition, however faulty, or any exhortation, 
however feeble, will be as acceptable as 
the most carefully wrought-out produc- 
tion. But no matter what his tempta- 
tions, a prophet of the Lord cannot be 
lazy without forfeiting his power. Unless 
you work as hard as Italians do when 
they are digging ditches, and as hod- 
carriers do when they are carrying mortar, 
and as farmers do when they are in the 
harvest field, and as doctors do in attend- 
ing to their patients, and as merchants do 
in bearing the heavy burdens of financial 
responsibility, and as mothers do in the 
ordering of their households and in the 



The Growing of Sermons 81 

rearing of their children, you have no 
right to stand in the pulpit on the Lord's 
day and as a representative of Christ tell 
his people how they ought to live. Learn 
to live first yourself. 

i. Work by the watch, not necessarily 
with the watch ever open before you, but 
with a sense of time deeply grounded in 
your mind. Thousands of your fellow- 
countrymen are out of bed every morning 
at four o'clock. They must be in order 
that they may live. Tens of thousands 
are out of bed at five, hundreds of thou- 
sands are up at six, and millions are at 
their work in factory and mill at seven, 
having breakfasted and traveled long dis- 
tances in steam or trolley cars in order 
to get to work on time. Shame on you 
if you habitually lie in bed till seven or 
eight or nine as your sluggish body 
dictates, and then arise to spend an hour 
on the daily papers and dawdle over a 
magazine, getting down to honest work 
it may be at ten or eleven, and possibly 



82 The Minister as Prophet 

not at all. A man with so little conscience 
ought to be whipped out of the ministry. 
Anthony Trollope, the English novelist, 
always worked with his watch before him, 
doing a prescribed amount of work each 
day, saying that as a writer he was bound 
by the same rules of industry as those 
which the other laborers of England were 
bound to obey. A minister of the Gospel 
ought not to be less conscientious than a 
writer of fiction. 

2. Work if you can without a break. 
You cannot do it every day, but do it 
when you can. Desultory thinking, and 
thinking done in fits and starts between 
the interruptions of intruding visitors and 
duties, is not the kind of thinking which 
builds up the preacher's mind. It is good 
for him every day to be for a while alone. 
And a minister can be alone if he shuts 
himself in, and refuses to be disturbed. 
Some ministers do not believe this, but 
it is because they have never resolutely 
tried it. People are beautifully sensible 



The Growing of Sermons 83 

and reasonable in all such matters if a 
minister will take them into his confi- 
dence. If he tells them that he desires 
certain hours each day for uninterrupted 
study and then proves on the succeeding 
Sundays that he has really studied and 
not done something else, they will not 
only be glad to let him have his mornings, 
but they will be proud that they have a 
minister who can preach. Nothing is so 
galling to a congregation as the necessity 
of saying, " Our minister is a good man 
but — he cannot preach ! " It may be, of 
course, that some crank in the parish will 
raise an outcry if the minister does not see 
him at any hour when he may choose to 
call, but let no one be thereby disconcerted, 
for the cranks, no doubt, are stationed by 
the predestination of Almighty God in 
every parish to test the patience and de- 
velop the courage of those who preach 
the word. 

It is said that Spurgeon, when he was 
told that an importunate visitor insisted 



84 The Minister as Prophet 

on seeing him on the ground that he 
was a servant of the Lord, sent back 
this all-sufficing answer, " Tell the ser- 
vant of the Lord that I am engaged with 
his Master.'' The great business men of 
New York City do not see every stranger 
or visitor who may choose to call. They 
barricade themselves behind clerks and 
attendants, seeing only those who by ap- 
pointment have a legitimate claim upon 
their time. If men engaged in earthly 
enterprises thus carefully safeguard their 
strength in order to do better work, the 
minister intrusted with business of the 
King will not be held guiltless if he sur- 
renders himself to the whims and exac- 
tions of every careless passer-by. 

3. Never forget you are working 
for the immortal sons of God. For them 
you can never afford to do work that is 
slipshod. If you scamp your work for 
men, you show scant reverence for their 
Maker. No matter how plain and hum- 
ble your congregation, you are under 



The Growing of Sermons 85 

obligation to do your best. You must 
never come down to people, but in 
every case go up. Ministers of the 
Gospel are not sent to look down on their 
brethren, but to be their servant and 
their friend. St. Paul wrote his letters to 
little groups of very humble folk. The 
churches of his day were made up for the 
most part of obscure laboring people, 
many of them being servants, with here 
and there a slave. The church in Corinth 
was not different from the churches in 
other places. Paul reminds the Corinthian 
Christians that not many wise, not many 
mighty, not many noble, were called. That 
is, there were few scholars or men of in- 
fluence or representatives of high society 
in the Corinthian congregation. Never- 
theless, in the writing of his letter Paul 
did his best He wrote them one of 
the greatest epistles ever penned by the 
hand of man. In that letter he wrote 
a hymn of love which excels in beauty 
everything which Plato ever wrote. And 



86 The Minister as Prophet 

along with the hymn of love he sent an 
argument on the resurrection which out- 
strips in majesty and eloquence the proud- 
est page of Aristotle. 

Do not be afraid of throwing away 
your best efforts on the poorest and 
plainest people God lets you serve. They 
may be ignorant, obscure, and uninter- 
esting, but probably in the world to 
come your highest joy will be the mem- 
ory that when these people were far 
away from the Father's house, undevel- 
oped in the virtues which make men 
strong and in the graces which make 
them lovely, you were kind to them and 
helped them, heartening them for fresh 
efforts to travel up the long and toilsome 
way. To preach to these " little ones," 
as though they were indeed the brethren 
of our Lord, this is an act which in God's 
universe can never be forgotten, and 
which is certain to bring an exceeding 
great reward. 

4. Work with your spirit and on your 



The Growing of Sermons 87 

spirit. This is best done in prayer. 
Men who would preach must pray. Few 
of us pray enough. The reason why we 
pray but little is because praying is hard 
work. It is taxing and exhausting. We 
do not easily pray. Our minds are too 
undisciplined and our hearts too worldly 
to come easily into communion with the 
Eternal Spirit. To concentrate the atten- 
tion on one who is invisible, and to bring 
all the faculties into subjection and pros- 
trate them before the throne requires a 
forthputting of energy of which even the 
strongest men are capable only for a 
period exceeding brief. But this is work 
which cannot be neglected. It is every- 
thing for a preacher to be attuned to 
the Eternal. 

The strings of human nature must be 
keyed tightly if they are to give forth 
music when the breath of heaven blows 
through them. If sermons are to grow, 
they must have sunshine. In prayer man 
lets in the sun. When Martin Luther 



88 The Minister as Prophet 

was busiest he prayed the most ; when 
we are busiest we pray the least. Because 
he prayed he shook the crown from the 
head of the Bishop of Rome. You will 
never shake the crown from the brow of 
any enemy of God unless you are men 
of prayer. The apostles were not mis- 
taken when they put praying before 
preaching. They were sent out to preach 
the word, but they knew they could not 
preach until they prayed. Their great 
declaration is worthy of a place on every 
minister's study wall : " We will continue 
steadfastly in prayer, and in the ministry 
of the word." 

5. Work with your head. Use the 
gray matter of the brain. Develop your 
mind by bringing it into contact with the 
great minds of the race. You ought to 
have the best books ever written. First 
of all, you must study the Bible. I do 
not mean read it, but study it. It is a 
hard book. Certain pages are opaque. 
Many sentences are obscure. There are 



The Growing of Sermons 89 

apparent inconsistencies and contradic- 
tions. Many things are hard to under- 
stand. Truth lies piled up in masses, 
and you must organize it and put it into 
shape for modern uses. You must ask 
and seek and knock, or you will never 
get into the deep meanings of scripture. 
You must dig, and you must dig deep, 
and no money is better spent than on 
books which will help you get still deeper 
into this revelation which came through 
holy men of old. 

But the Bible is not the only book. 
God has revealed himself through other 
men than the Jews. English literature 
contains a revelation. You ought to 
read poetry for vision and music and 
color, biography for stimulus and cour- 
age and patience, history for perspective 
and proportion, science for a revela- 
tion as wonderful in its way as the 
revelation which came through Moses 
and the prophets of Israel, fiction for 
the analysis of character and the widen- 



90 The Minister as Prophet 

ing of experience, and last but not least 
theology, the queen of the sciences, and 
all those related sciences which pay obei- 
sance to the queen. Shut yourselves up 
with the great books. Do not spend too 
much time on magazines and papers. 
Read the great poets and the great biog- 
raphies and the great histories and the 
great novels, and strive to know some- 
thing of the great sciences of astronomy 
and biology. You are to read these not 
in order to parade your learning before 
your congregation, but because great 
books make mental blood and muscle 
and bone. 

You ought to know ten thousand times 
more than you ever say. A preacher 
influences his congregation not simply 
by what he says, but by what he knows 
and says nothing about. We are not 
interested in the man who tells us all 
he knows. A sermon is only a cup 
of water, and it tastes better when we 
know that it comes from an inexhaustible 



l^he Growing of Sermons 91 

spring. A sermon is only a drop of spray, 
and it has a new sparkle in it when we 
feel behind it the roll of the Atlantic. 
A preacher to preach well must have 
reserve power, and reserve power comes 
from the preacher's consciousness that 
he has many treasures which he need 
not use. 

6. Work with your pen. Work a while 
every day. It is the pen which makes 
the exact man, and it is the pen which 
makes the accurate and forceful speaker. 
Writing is to many men sheer drudgery, 
but it is a form of drudgery which no 
preacher should try to escape. Nothing 
is so surprising to the average man as 
the discovery that the simplest style is, 
according to the testimony of all great 
writers, the result of enormous labor. It 
seems almost incredible that men should 
be willing to write their productions over 
as many times as some of the best-known 
writers have declared to be their practice. 
To write a sermon once is to some men 



92 The Minister as Prophet 

almost intolerable drudgery, and to write 
it over three and four and five and six 
times, as many pulpit princes have done, 
is to the average clergyman an utter im- 
possibility. With such reluctance to sub- 
mit to the drudgery of the pen, no wonder 
there is much slovenly and ineffective pul- 
pit English. 

An English writer of distinction was 
in the habit of saying to all aspirants 
for literary honors, " Fill your waste- 
basket.'' The advice is good also for 
preachers. A minister should fill his 
waste-basket again and again before he 
attempts to fill his people. Nothing is 
more difficult to learn than the art of 
using language with idiomatic grace and 
force. To select the broad-shouldered 
nouns and stalwart verbs which will best 
carry the weight of your ideas, to choose 
adjectives which will not exaggerate and 
adverbs which will not give a false accent 
or color, to frame the sentences with words 
so clear that your truth will blaze out 



The Graving of Sermons 93 

through them, to whip your paragraphs 
into subjection to your ruling purpose so 
that they shall carry your thought on to 
fresh coronations in the hearts of those 
who listen to you, — that is one of the 
greatest achievements to which any mortal 
can aspire, and a victory so difficult and 
glorious that to win it is worth an en- 
tire lifetime of heroic and unflagging toil. 
Brethren, use your pen. It is the key 
to one of the kingdoms of power. 

And now let me give you a surprising 
caution : Do not work too much on your 
sermons. You can never work too much 
on yourself, but to work too much on your 
sermons is dangerous and easy. You may 
work so long upon a sermon that you 
spoil it. It becomes too finished and 
has too fine a polish. It is as beautiful 
as a statue and as cold. It is intrusively 
a work of art. It smells of the lamp. It 
is not the spontaneous outgushing of a 
heart, but the dried and studied thing 
of a calculating brain. It is "faultily 



94 The Minister as Prophet 

faultless, icily regular, splendidly null." 
Avoid the perfection which smacks of 
the mechanical. It is a good thing that 
the sermon should be human. It may 
lose nothing of its power if it have an 
occasional blemish. Even to break down 
in grammar or to get tied up in a sen- 
tence is not a sin which has no forgive- 
ness. 

The letters of St. Paul are all the more 
interesting and endearing because they 
were written hurriedly and at white heat. 
He trips now and then, so eager is he 
to get on, and occasionally becomes so 
tangled in his construction that many a 
critic has been scandalized and declared 
him a bungler in the use of Greek. But 
the broken phrases and the embroiled sen- 
tences all bear witness to the fact that 
the apostle was in dead earnest, and after 
every slip he mounts up with wings as an 
eagle and lets us see what his great soul 
can do. 

It is an old story many times re- 



The Growing of Sermons 95 

peated, but one which never loses point, 
that Father Taylor, the Boston preacher 
to the sailors, once got so entangled in the 
folds of one of his rolling sentences that 
in sheer desperation he stopped, saying to 
his congregation, " Brethren, I have no 
idea where I started in on this sentence, 
and I have not the faintest conception 
where I am coming out, but of one thing 
I am absolutely certain, and that is that I 
am bound for the kingdom of heaven." 
A congregation which is sure that the 
preacher is bound for the kingdom of 
heaven and desires to take every one 
else with him, will not view him with a 
critic's eye, even though he occasionally 
drops below the elegance and precision 
of Demosthenes and Cicero. 

It is easy also for a minister to spoil his 
people. He may train them to expect word 
pictures and thrilling pieces of denuncia- 
tion and appeal. He may educate men to 
look upon the pulpit as a stage, and upon 
the preacher as an actor, and they may 



g6 The Minister as Prophet 

come to church just as they would go to 
the art gallery or the opera. It is bad 
for the preacher when his parishioners 
begin to prattle about his "beautiful" 
sermons, and endeavor to get others to 
come to church because they have such 
a "beautiful" preacher. If the pound 
cake is so artistically decorated that every 
one begins to talk about the frosting, it 
will be well to feed the people for a sea- 
son on brown bread. But the most dis- 
astrous result of overworking on a sermon 
is the impoverishment which may come to 
a minister's own soul. He may work on 
his sermons until he becomes decrepit and 
palsied in intellectual power and spiritu- 
ally thin. He may make so much of the 
sermon as to break down his health. It 
may become a sort of white elephant for 
which he must carry water every day. 
He may think about it so much that it 
will haunt him in his sleep, and give him 
no peace day or night. The minister is 
on the way to physical bankruptcy when 



The Growing of Sermons 97 

the sermon pursues him like a fiend 
through the week. 

And sympathy with men may also be 
destroyed. One may become such an 
artificer in thought and in language as 
to become fastidious and finical, caring 
more for the polish of a sermon than 
for the salvation of a soul. Many a 
man has worried more over a paragraph 
in his sermon than over a soul going 
down to perdition. The man who begins 
to idolize the sermon, and worships 
it every day, will sometimes become so 
fussy and pedantic that he cannot trust 
himself to say anything whatever unless 
it has been carefully wrought out with 
the pen. A man in this frame of mind 
is unfitted for the pulpit. The preacher 
must of all men be human, and a preacher 
is no longer human when he cannot at 
least sometimes open his mouth and talk 
out of the abundance of his heart like a 
man. 

By working all week on a sermon, 



98 The Minister as Prophet 

the minister robs himself of opportunity 
to range through those wider realms of 
thought which are absolutely indispensa- 
ble to the growing soul. I have known 
men to work so hard upon their sermons 
that they worked themselves down into 
intellectual shallowness and pulpit impo- 
tence. A sermon is nothing but a key ; 
it must be cast and filed, but it must not 
be filed until there is no strength left in 
the hand which is to turn it. The feed- 
ing of the hand is surely as important 
as the filing of the key. A sermon is a 
sword. It is important that the sword 
should have an edge. Sufficient time 
should be given to its sharpening. But 
it is also important that there should be 
a strong right arm capable of swinging 
the sword. A sermon is a rose. You 
gain nothing by picking at its petals. 
Your supreme work is keeping your heart 
so full of Christian blood that sermonic 
roses will bloom spontaneously on your 
lips. Therefore, work on your soul more 



The Growing of Sermons 99 

than on your sermon, more on the soil 
than on the thing which you wish to 
bring to market. 

The art of preaching is something 
like the art of agriculture. The suc- 
cessful farmer works incessantly on the 
soil. He fertilizes it, changes the fertil- 
izer from time to time, shifts his crops 
now to one field, now to another, always 
studying the condition of the soil. He 
breaks up one field, lets another field 
lie fallow, works with the soil in all sorts 
of ways that every field may be rich and 
mellow. The secret of good farming lies 
in constant working with the soil. It is, 
of course, important that the seed should 
be good, but good seed avails nothing in an 
exhausted soil. Now a preacher is noth- 
ing but a spiritual farmer. His mind 
is his farm. From that farm he must 
bring repeated harvests for the feeding 
of the sons of God. Unlike the farmer 
he expects a harvest every seven days. 
This is a tremendous drain. Every week 



LofC. 



100 The Minister as Prophet 

two sermons must be garnered, and the 
sermons will be determined by the nature 
of the soil. Unless the soil is fertilized 
heavily from day to day, and unless it 
is worked with, and that unceasingly, the 
soil is certain to grow shallow, and in the 
pulpit there will be an exhausted man. 

That is the reason why so many minis- 
ters cross the dead line early. They fail 
to work with the soil. Many of them are 
honest and faithful men who have tried 
with loyal heart to do their work in the 
fear of God and for the advancement of 
his kingdom, but they have worked too 
exclusively upon their sermons and have 
not built up their mind, and the result is 
that year by year they have dwindled in 
the pulpit, and by and by have not been 
able to preach acceptably at all. Many 
a minister is not so good a preacher at 
forty as he was at thirty, and hundreds 
cannot preach so well at fifty as they did 
at forty. A congregation knows at once 
whether or not there is in the pulpit an 



The Growing of Sermons 101 

exhausted man. No experience or learn- 
ing is a substitute for freshness and 
vitality. Young men who are fresh at 
thirty are immeasurably superior to men, 
thin and exhausted at fifty, for the work 
of preaching is the work of lifting, and 
lifting requires a man of strength. Men 
who work incessantly on the soil, build- 
ing their mind up four square in mental 
alertness and capacity, do not cross the 
dead line ever, but work on successfully 
till the sun goes down. 

The preacher is like the horticulturist, 
and sermons are like roses. The man who 
would produce fine roses must pay attention 
to the conditions under which fine roses 
grow. The soil must be rich, the sunshine 
must be abundant, the moisture must be 
sufficient, and simply by securing these con- 
ditions the roses come forth of themselves. 
Man supplies the conditions and God 
brings forth the roses. God lets man help 
him bring forth roses, but man's work is 
confined largely to the culture of the soil. 



102 The Minister as Prophet 

The man who flings himself enthusiasti- 
cally into the production of his sermons, 
determined that he will give his strength 
and time to the processes of sermon build- 
ing, is a man who will surely fail because 
he is beginning wrong. In the deepest 
sense God alone makes sermons, and what 
man must do is to work incessantly on the 
soil. The man who keeps his soul fertil- 
ized and mellow will never, when Sunday 
comes, find himself without a sermon. 

The problem of problems then for every 
preacher is not how to make a sermon, but 
how to cultivate the soul in such a way as 
that there shall be sap sufficient to pro- 
duce sermonic blossoms which shall make 
the Sabbaths fragrant, and leaves which 
shall be for the healing of the congrega- 
tion. 

Let me urge you then to set aside one 
morning from the very start on which you 
will not work upon your sermon — work 
on everything else than that. Put your 
sermon topic into your mind as early as 



The Growing of Sermons 103 

you wish, and let it lie there undisturbed. 
There is such a thing as unconscious cere- 
bration, and probably this goes on even 
in one's sleep. It is surprising how a sub- 
ject once dropped into the mind gathers 
round it kindred material from the experi- 
ence which comes to one from day to day. 
A magnet drawn through sand in which 
there are iron filings will not more surely 
pick out the iron than will an idea held 
in the mind pick out related ideas from 
every book one reads and from every con- 
versation. An active-minded man cannot 
cast a text into his soul without discovering 
on its removal, after the lapse of several 
weeks, that other thoughts have crystallized 
around it and that a sermon is in the pro- 
cess of formation. 

This unconscious sermonic work will 
go forward through the days. But on 
one day of every week banish your 
sermon from your conscious thought 
and give yourself to some favorite and 
rewarding study. For a day work only 



104 The Minister as Prophet 

on the soil. At first one day will prob- 
ably be all that you can spare, for in the 
early years a deal of time is required to 
give the sermon form. Special reading 
must be done, throwing light on next Sun- 
day's subject, and the structure of the 
sermon is sometimes baffling, and language 
too is intractable and stubborn ; and what 
with his language and his plan and his 
ideas, the beginning preacher has much 
to do. 

Four mornings on two sermons are 
none too many for the average man 
through the beginning years. But as soon 
as possible the minister should cut down 
his sermon mornings to three, giving two 
entire mornings to biblical, scientific, or 
historical studies. On these two mornings 
let him work upon the soil, and his people 
will discover that his sermons have new 
fragrance and flavor. After a few years 
it may be that the sermonic work can be 
crowded into two mornings, and three 
whole mornings be left for the building 



The Growing of Sermons 105 

up of mental nerve and bone. Wide study 
in these days is essential that men may 
see our problems in true perspective and 
right relations. A little man with narrow- 
view can cause a world of trouble. Our 
problems are intricate and difficult, and 
only ministers of extensive learning are 
capable of grappling with themes so 
great. 

The three mornings given to church his- 
tory or Christian doctrine will make you 
wiser when you come to deal with the 
next problem that confronts you in your 
parish work. They will also give you a 
balance of judgment and mental poise 
which your people will feel, although they 
may not know their cause. It may be that 
after years of training you can give shape 
to two sermons in a single morning, re- 
serving four mornings sacred for study 
and research. It is said that Dean Farrar, 
in his later years, never spent more than 
three hours on a sermon, and that is prob- 
ably enough for any man who is full of 



106 The Minister as Prophet 

the Christian spirit and has a disciplined 
and well-furnished mind. I suppose that 
in the ideal preacher's life there would be 
no time at all set aside for working on the 
sermon, but that the preacher simply doing 
his work from day to day, and keeping 
his mind moving through atmospheres im- 
pregnated with ideas, would on the Lord's 
day find a message already formulated in 
his heart, and be able to stir men's souls 
and lift them, simply by opening his 
mouth and allowing the message to come 
out. 

But no such ideal preaching is possible 
without long preliminary years of patient 
and painstaking toil. There are men who 
have approached it. I think I have read 
somewhere that Spurgeon once declared 
that if he were given seven days in which 
to prepare a sermon, he would devote all the 
week but the last half hour to other things, 
and get his sermon within these last thirty 
minutes. Spurgeon was an indefatigable 
worker. He could do as much work in a 



The Growing of Sermons 107 

day as ten ordinary men. He had an im- 
mense library which he knew how to use, 
and he was also working constantly with 
men. Living thus close to God and work- 
ing thus enthusiastically with men, it was 
possible after long years of practice for 
him to formulate a sermon in half an 
hour. 

Our greatest American preacher was 
able to do the same. Henry Ward 
Beecher, in his early years, worked assidu- 
ously with books and pen, but in later life 
he often prepared his sermon after his 
Sunday morning breakfast. This does not 
mean that he did not work all through the 
week. His active brain was never idle. 
His great heart was always engaged in 
some mighty labor. As he himself once 
expressed it, he was like a woman with a 
pan of dough ; he was kneading the dough 
all the time. On Sunday morning he sim- 
ply gave shape to material which had in 
his soul become thoroughly and vitally his 
own. Or to change the figure, the cream 



108 The Minister as Prophet 

kept rising through the week, and on the 
Lord's day he skimmed the cream, and 
gave it to the people. 

What is a sermon but a cup of cream 
skimmed from the preacher's life ? It 
is said that one of the most noted 
preachers of London usually prepares 
his sermon on the day on which it is 
to be delivered. He works incessantly 
through the week, and then on Sunday 
gives utterance to the truth which is at 
that time uppermost in his soul. But all 
such hasty preparation of the letter of 
the sermon should never be attempted 
until after years of stern self-discipline 
and long-continued practice in the art of 
self-expression. The sermon at its best 
estate is not a fine oration or a labored 
argument, but the simple testimony to the 
reality of things spiritual and eternal of 
a witness whose life is hid with Christ 
in God. 

Make the tree good. This is the one 
thing necessary. The sermon is the man, 



The Growing of Sermons 109 

and upon the man everything depends. 
Pulpit power rests not on your learning 
nor on your mastery of the technique of 
expression, but on the radiance and sweet- 
ness of your personality. You must be so 
good and true and Christlike that you 
yourself shall seem to be a part of the 
Christian revelation, and the eternal truth 
of God seem to be bursting into fresh 
splendor on your lips. Any man can re- 
peat the words of Jesus and the apostles, 
but not every man can repeat them as 
though they were indeed his native speech. 
Any man can toy with the conceptions of 
the sacred scriptures, but not every one 
can move among them as though they 
were features of the familiar world in 
which he lives and moves and has his 
being. You should be so filled with the 
Holy Spirit that helpful, precious pearls of 
speech shall fall as naturally from your 
lips as miracles did from the finger tips of 
Jesus, and you ought to live so near to 
God that when you speak, the place in 



HO The Minister as Prophet 

which you stand shall be filled with holy 
light, and all the people going homeward 
shall feel a spiritual peace and exaltation, 
knowing that something beautiful has 
passed their way. 



IV 

Form and Manner 

When a man appears before us with a 
message, the heart has three questions. 
The first is, "Who is he?" If he is a 
lunatic, then that information is sufficient. 
We do not care to listen any more. If, 
however, he is a man of sanity and intelli- 
gence, there is a second question, "What 
is his message ? " Is it a triviality or a 
vagary or an explosion of prejudice or pas- 
sion, sound and fury signifying nothing ? 
If so, no matter who he is, we do not care 
to hear him. But if he is a man of sense 
delivering a sober message, then there is a 
third question, " How is he going to say 
it ? " Will he deliver his message bunglingly 
and obscurely, slovenly and with an insult 
to taste, or will he present it in a way which 
in 



112 The Minister as Prophet 

will open the heart and make the new truth 
beautiful ? Who is he, what is his mes- 
sage, how is he delivering it, — these are 
the three questions which every congrega- 
tion is sure to ask. To the third question 
your attention is now invited. It is not the 
first question, to be sure, nor is it yet the 
second, and because it is only third there 
are those who pass it by altogether. To 
them the only things important are that 
the messenger should be reliable and that 
the message should be momentous, and 
with these things settled, it matters not 
what is the form or manner. The preacher 
who reasons thus is guilty of a cardinal 
blunder which will cripple him in all his 
life and work. 

Above all the other religions of the 
world the Christian religion relies upon 
the tongue. There are religions which 
rely upon the sword, and there are others 
which rely upon the state, and there are 
others which rely upon the example of 
dumb devotees, but the Christian religion 



Form and Manner 113 

from the beginning has relied upon the 
tongue. The founder of Christianity was 
a preacher, and the men whom he sent out 
were ordained to preach. They were to take 
no weapons with them ; the world was to 
be overcome simply by their words. The 
religion of Jesus of Nazareth enthrones 
and glorifies the tongue. 

Language thus assumes a place of 
unique significance in the work of the 
Christian minister. It is the instrument 
by which he is to work out his purposes, 
the weapon by which he is to subdue the 
world. It is the rod by which he is to 
work his miracles. Demosthenes struck 
the Greeks and the Greeks struck the 
King of Macedon. Peter the Hermit 
struck Europe and Europe struck the 
Turk. Wendell Phillips struck the North 
and the North struck down slavery. You 
must with your tongue so strike your 
congregation that your congregation shall 
want to smite down every form of evil. 
Language is the train on which the ideas 



114 The Minister as Prophet 

of redemption are to be conveyed from the 
preacher's soul to others. "Take heed 
to your language," then, would seem to 
be an exhortation to which every minister 
of Christ should give ready ear. 

Just as in certain cities the railroad train 
stops and every wheel of every car is care- 
fully inspected, men with flaring torches 
and hammers of steel, looking with eye 
and listening with ear for any open or con- 
cealed defect, and all in order that not a 
single life may be put in jeopardy in the 
crossing of river or climbing of mountains, 
so ought the words of every sermon be 
subjected to the closest scrutiny that not 
one thought shall fail to make the transit 
from the preacher's to the hearer's soul. 
For what are words but verbal cars in 
which are conveyed the food and raiment 
for the children of the King ! In them 
are packed thought and hope and love, 
sympathy and tenderness and pity, uplift 
and outlook and new horizon, and all 
these must be carried from the soul of 



Form and Manner 115 

the preacher into the souls of those for 
whom these treasures are intended. 

A preacher intent on his work must give 
constant attention to his words. It is too 
often forgotten that language is the body 
of thought and that thought depends for 
its effectiveness on its body. It is with 
ideas as it is with men, — they are worth- 
less upon earth without a body. No dis- 
embodied man has ever done anything in 
history, neither has a disembodied idea. 
The ideas which are mighty are the ideas 
which are expressed, and the ideas which 
prevail are those which have received the 
most vigorous and stalwart expression. 
The body of thought must be nourished 
just as truly as the body of man. Lan- 
guage must be fed if it is to be healthy, 
and thin and pallid language is as 
feeble and ineffective in the realm of 
thought as are anaemic and emaciated 
men in the realm of the world's work 
and battle. To feed his vocabulary and 
nourish his style is one of the most 



Ii6 The Minister as Prophet 

important works which a preacher has 
to do. 

And while this is important for every 
minister of Christ, whatever his eccle- 
siastical connections, it is doubly impera- 
tive for a minister who belongs to any 
branch of the Christian church which has 
laid aside the sensuous symbols of mediae- 
valism. There is something about the 
celebration of the mass which is warming. 
The great altar, the candles, the incense, 
the robes, all appeal to the eye and shed 
a radiance into the heart of the sympa- 
thetic worshiper. The paintings and the 
pictured windows and the statues in 
churches which have discarded the in- 
cense and the candles, all appeal to the 
eye and serve to rob worship of its pale- 
ness and coldness. But in many a church 
there is nothing of the dim religious light. 
There are no storied windows, no glori- 
ous paintings, no statues of our Lord or 
his apostles. All is plain and drab and 
bare. Upon the minister depends the 



Form and Manner 117 

lighting up of all the worship. He must 
do this work with his words. His phrases 
must be candles giving forth a sacred 
light His sentences must be paintings 
picturing things which the heart adores. 
His paragraphs must be incense filling 
all the place with a heavenly aroma. 
His words must give to the church color 
and fragrance, and life and fire, and the 
whole sermon beautiful with scented and 
tinted words must leave the soul flooded 
with melody in the immediate presence of 
God. With no liturgy and no symbolism, 
bare and naked indeed is the worship of 
a Protestant church if the preacher uses 
only threadbare and faded words. 

The power of language can scarcely be 
overestimated. Arnold says that Gray 
doubled his force by his style. So can 
every preacher. President Eliot of Har- 
vard does not put the case too strongly 
when he says that " it is a liberal educa- 
tion which teaches a man to speak and 
write his native language strongly, ac- 



n8 The Minister as Prophet 

curately, and persuasively. It is a suffi- 
cient reward for the whole long course 
of twelve years spent in liberal study." 
President Eliot owes not a little of his 
wide influence over American thought to 
the fact that he is master of English. 
When one studies the men who are to- 
day foremost in the pulpit, he discovers 
that without exception they are men with 
great gifts of expression. The man who 
has probably exerted the widest influence 
within the last ten years over the religious 
thought of America could not have done 
it had it not been for his style. His 
language is as clear as a mountain brook, 
with his thoughts like shining pebbles 
at the bottom of it. For his purpose the 
style is well-nigh perfect, luminous, and 
transparent as the almost matchless diction 
of Voltaire. 

Another American preacher subdues 
and solemnizes his congregation by means 
of his beautiful and stately English. He 
has been a student of poetry and phi- 



Form and Manner 119 

losophy, and his style has in it some- 
thing of the majesty of Milton, with 
now and then a hint of the massiveness 
of Shakespeare, and here and there the 
sweetness and the melody of Tennyson. 
The style is not so clear as that of our 
other preacher, but even the occasional 
obscurity is not without its charm. There 
are masses of golden haze, but it is the 
haze that lies on the bosom of a wide, 
deep sea. One of the mightiest of living 
English preachers has a style quite dif- 
ferent still. His language fits his thought 
as tightly as the skin fits the flesh. It 
contains no wrinkle, and is so natural and 
so true that unless you sit before it as a 
critic and pay close attention to the words, 
you will not notice the language at all. 
Style is perfect when it becomes in- 
visible. 

Brethren, believe in the power of words. 
They have a force almost divine, and this 
force is yours if you know how to use it. 
Think of the great work which you must 



120 The Minister as Prophet 

do. By means of words you must help 
men to see the sublime contours of great 
duties and the shining outlines of fair 
ideals. By language you are to cause the 
blind to see, and also the deaf to hear. 
By words you are to help men hear that 
music of the spirit world which soothes 
and charms and lifts and blesses. By 
words you are to make men feel. You 
are to control for an hour the emotional 
tides of the heart. You are to compel 
men to feel the smart and sting of con- 
demned sinners and also the raptures of 
forgiveness. You are to bring men to 
decision, helping them to choose, and their 
choice though brief is yet endless. Since 
all this and more must be done by means 
of words, how foolish for any minister to 
neglect the study of expression. What- 
ever gift a man may have at the beginning, 
it should be cultivated through the years, 
and every year should be regretted which 
does not witness a progress in the master- 
ing of words. 



Form and Manner 121 

The human heart is sensitive to simple 
and lovely speech. The amoeba, one of 
the lowest of microscopic organisms, is 
not insensible to color. It has no eyes, 
but in some mysterious way it feels a 
difference in colors. There is no con- 
gregation, however untrained and unde- 
veloped, which cannot feel the difference 
between purple and dull-colored speech. 
The plainest and least-cultivated people 
will respond to words fitly spoken, and the 
dullest listener will be aroused by a para- 
graph which gives forth a flash of crimson 
or a gleam of gold. You must be a man 
of visions and you must be also a man of 
words, and the work of fitting them to- 
gether is one of the most critical and deli- 
cate tasks which a prophet of the Lord 
is called upon to do. The best English 
spoken anywhere ought to be heard in the 
Christian pulpit. 

Endeavor to avoid mispronunciations. 
Many ministers are inexcusably careless 
on this point. There are men who go on 



122 The Minister as Prophet 

mispronouncing familiar words for years, 
and it seems as though the mispronounced 
words are the very words which most fre- 
quently occur. There are in almost every 
congregation cultured people to whose 
ears a mispronunciation is a blow, and a 
person of taste cannot be struck again and 
again on the same nerve without the nerve 
crying out in pain. Use the dictionary 
and use it often. Keep it out beside your 
Bible. Whenever in doubt consult it. Go 
to it even though you are well-nigh certain 
that you already know. Let every unfa- 
miliar word lead you to it, and get out of 
bed if need be to settle a dictionary problem 
which has risen in your mind. There are 
young people in every congregation to 
whom a mispronunciation is an unpardon- 
able offense. Verbal blunders prove to 
them that the preacher is at least on one 
point ignorant, and being ignorant on one 
point he may be ignorant on all. It is pos- 
sible to weaken one's influence forever by 
slips which might easily have been avoided. 



Form and Manner 123 

And then beware of worn-out words. 
A minister's vocabulary is subjected to 
terrific usage, and it will grow old and 
threadbare unless constantly renewed. 
Unless he is alert he will find himself 
using the same word again and again 
until it becomes odious or a joke. When 
a preacher uses the same word twenty 
times in his prayer, and then begins 
to use it twenty times or more in his 
sermon, the mind is distracted from the 
thought, and the hearer begins to calculate 
how soon the word will come out again. 

It is well from time to time to cull out 
the poor abused and broken-down words 
and shut them up in an asylum until they 
recover from their exhaustion. Words have 
nervous prostration, as human beings have, 
and when long overworked they should 
have an outing and a rest. Avoid the use 
of any dialect unknown to the people to 
whom you preach. There are various dia- 
lects used by Americans, and the preacher 
is likely to have his own. The lawyers have 



124 The Minister as Prophet 

a dialect and the doctors have a different 
one, and the theologians one different still. 
Avoid the dialect of every special class, 
and use the broad, plain, human speech of 
God's common people. When our mis- 
sionaries go across the sea, they give years 
to mastering the language of the people to 
whom they have been sent. The time is 
well spent, for no pentecost is possible 
until men hear the gospel in the language 
in which they were born. 

There are three rules which should never 
be forgotten. First of all be clear. You 
must be clear. If you are not clear, how 
can you be understood, and what is the use 
of preaching if people do not understand 
what you say ? St. Paul has expressed the 
opinion of every man of sense upon this 
matter : " I had rather speak five words 
that I might teach others than ten thousand 
words in an unknown tongue." All the 
great preachers from Paul to Moody have 
agreed upon that one point. Augustine 
was a teacher of grammar and rhetoric, 



Form and Manner 125 

and had a fondness for the rotundity and 
finish of florid Latin, but when he became 
a preacher, he laid aside his polished 
rhetoric and spoke in the Latin of the 
common people. Martin Luther always 
kept his eye upon the peasants, saying 
that if he could speak in language which 
they could understand, then all classes 
would be instructed and edified. 

Make it your ambition to be clear. It is 
your business to be understood. If you are 
not intelligible to every attentive listener of 
average intelligence, then offer no excuses, 
but find out what the trouble is. Do not 
say you are too deep, for the chances are 
you are knee deep in the mud. Deepest 
water is always clear, and it is when we 
reach a puddle that we cannot see the 
bottom. Your lack of clearness is in all 
probability due to shallowness, and by 
becoming deeper you will be more easily 
understood. Do not think you are great 
just because you can preach only to culti- 
vated people. That is the sign of a 



126 The Minister as Prophet 

mediocre preacher. The great preachers 
through the centuries have all been able to 
reach all classes of the people. Great 
poets do the same. The poems of Homer 
were appreciated both by Pericles and also 
by the sausage sellers in the streets of 
Athens. The poems of Virgil were relished 
by the Emperor Augustus and also by the 
shepherds and vine-dressers of Italy. The 
poems of Shakespeare were the delight of 
the greatest wits of the Elizabethan court, 
and were also popular among the ground- 
lings from the lowest streets of London. 
Robert Burns warms the hearts of the 
greatest Scottish theologians, and stirs the 
blood of the farmer boy following the plow. 
It is characteristic of greatness that 
it appeals to the universal human heart. 
America's two greatest preachers, — and 
the only two supremely great, — Henry 
Ward Beecher and Phillips Brooks, could 
preach to students and professors and 
also to artisans and servant girls. If 
you cannot be understood except by the 



Form and Manner 127 

elite, it is not because you are so deep, 
but because your organ is deficient in 
the number of its stops. The deepest 
preacher of the ages was Jesus of Nazareth, 
and all his language is simplicity itself. 
What is simpler than this ? " He that 
would save his life must lose it," but it is 
deeper than plummet can sound. What is 
more easily understood than this ? " Ex- 
cept ye become as a little child ye cannot 
enter into the kingdom of God," but who 
can fathom the depths of it ? The man 
who lay on Jesus' breast was also simple in 
his style. The first chapter of the fourth 
gospel is written for the most part in 
monosyllables, but it is the deepest page of 
composition ever written. It was Paul who 
said so simply, " Christ died for our sins," 
but even the angels try to see the bottom 
of it and are not able. If, therefore, a 
preacher deals in long and opaque words, 
it is not because his thought is deep, but 
because he has not yet mastered the art of 
putting things. 



128 The Minister as Prophet 

Another rule is : Be simple. The ex- 
hortation of Charles Lamb to Coleridge, 
" Cultivate simplicity/' should be heeded 
by the preacher. Elaborateness is out of 
place in these hurried days, and rhetorical 
tucks and flounces should be mercilessly 
cut off. Milton said that poetry should be 
simple, sensuous, and impassioned, and that 
is also what a sermon ought to be. It 
should be simple in its language, vivid in 
its imagery, and shot through and through 
with subtle fire. Daniel Webster still 
holds his place as one of America's greatest 
orators, and one of the secrets of his power 
is the simplicity of his style. While yet a 
young man he came to the conclusion that, 
as he was to earn his living by talking to 
plain people, it was necessary that he 
should learn to use plain language. In 
simplicity of diction Webster has never had 
but one superior, and that is Abraham 
Lincoln. Lincoln's speech at Gettysburg 
registers the high-water mark of effective 
English prose, and that speech is the sim- 
plest in our literature. 



Form and Manner 129 

But how can one be simple ? By the 
study of the masters. Be a constant 
reader of great books. Read Newman 
for music, and Ruskin for color, and Car- 
lyle for pictures, and John Morley for 
discrimination, and Mark Rutherford for 
simplicity. Read Tennyson as long as 
you live. His " Idylls of the King " are in 
my judgment- the finest piece of English 
written in the nineteenth century. Of 
course you will all read Shakespeare, the 
unrivaled master of human speech. Read 
him for his simplicity and also for the art 
of using short and vivid words. Contrast 
the English of the speech he puts into the 
mouth of Mark Antony with the English 
of many modern sermons. 

" I am no orator, as Brutus is ; 
But, as you know me all, a plain blunt man, 
That love my friend ; and that they know full well 
That gave me public leave to speak of him : 
For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth " — 

Mark those monosyllables. Would we 
have used them ? No. We would have 



130 The Minister as Prophet 

said, " For I have neither mental acumen, 
nor an extensive vocabulary, nor ethical 
significance/' That is what is the matter 
with much of our modern preaching; it is 
too full of " ethical significance " and " ex- 
tensive vocabulary" and "mental acumen," 
and has not enough of this "wit and words 
and worth." 

" Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech, 
To stir men's blood !" 

Mark that ! We would have said " arouse 
men's emotions," but Shakespeare knows 
how to find the heart, and his words jab 
like rapiers — " stir men's blood ! " 

" I only speak right on ; 
I tell you that which you yourselves do know ; 
Shew you sweet Caesar's wounds, poor, poor dumb 
mouths." 

Do you notice that pathos ? Change those 
monosyllables into " miserable, pitiable, 
inarticulate mouths," and all the pathos 
has vanished. 

" But were I Brutus, 
And Brutus Antony, there were an Antony 



Form and Manner 131 

Would ruffle up your spirits, and put a tongue 
In every wound of Caesar, that should move 
The stones of Rome to rise and mutiny." 

That is the kind of English which preach- 
ers need, and the more you have of it the 
mightier you will be in swaying the hearts 
of men. The list would not be complete 
without the Bible. It is Shakespeare and 
Tennyson, Ruskin and Carlyle, Newman 
and Mark Rutherford combined. You 
will never preach as God intended you 
to preach unless you are a constant, keen- 
eyed student of the language of the 
scriptures. 

But language to do its full and perfect 
work must have the interpreting voice. 
No matter what the preacher's mental 
gifts or written style may be, if he lacks 
the flexible and expressive voice, he goes 
maimed and halting to his work. The 
voice is the most subtle and mysterious 
of all the organs of the soul. It seems 
to be halfway between the body and the 
spirit, and to be the product and also the 



132 The Minister as Prophet 

servant of them both. The voice of 
the preacher should be clear and flexible, 
taking color easily and making mental 
and emotional valuations with rapidity 
and precision. Many a preacher does 
not exert upon his congregation more 
than a fraction of his power, because he 
stands behind a stiff and unsympathizing 
voice. If the man's words say one thing 
and his voice says another, if with his lan- 
guage he appeals and with his tones he 
repels, he is working at cross purposes, 
and much of his energy is thrown away. 
If the sermon is a heart-to-heart talk of 
the preacher with his people, then it is 
desirable that his heart should throb 
and pulsate in his tones. Vocal culture, 
therefore, is an art which no student 
for the ministry should thoughtlessly 
pass by. 

But vocal culture, however important, 
has long been in disrepute. Elocution is 
considered even by many intelligent and 
well-informed people as something me- 



Form and Manner 133 

chanical and superficial, a sort of pastime 
for young ladies, but nothing serious 
enough to deserve a place in the cur- 
riculum of earnest-hearted men. This 
prejudice has held sway in many of our 
seminaries, the result being that the 
teacher of elocution has been usually 
the poorest-paid member of the faculty, 
or has been merely a visiting instructor 
with no official standing whatever. And 
there is a reason for all this. Too often 
the teachers of elocution have been shal- 
low and uneducated men, teaching in a 
mechanical way, and running their pupils 
into a common mold, so that all the mem- 
bers of the same school have come out 
with similar tones and gestures, every 
pupil thus being spoiled. Moreover, a 
little knowledge is a dangerous thing, 
and in no department of human learning 
is this so true as in the science and art 
of elocution. A little elocution is indeed 
ridiculous. A man who studies voice and 
gesture just long enough to be conscious 



134 The Minister as Prophet 

of them cuts a sorry figure when he comes 
before the people. 

Elocution is a curse unless studied 
so long and patiently that all its scaf- 
folding disappears, and there is left no 
trace of the various processes by which 
the voice has been redeemed. But voice 
culture in itself is one of the noblest 
and finest of the arts, and there is no 
reason why men should not learn how to 
speak as well as women learn how to sing. 
One does not speak well naturally any 
more than one sings well by nature, and 
unless a minister studies the art of tone 
production, he is almost certain to suffer 
for his neglect. The teacher of elocution 
should be one of the ablest of men, and 
his salary should be not a whit less than 
the highest. 

It takes a great man to be a safe 
teacher of the voice. He must know 
not only the voice, but the body and 
also the mind and also the heart. In 
voice production the whole being, body, 



Form and Manner 135 

soul, and spirit, is implicated, and the 
teacher who would instruct men in the 
art of speaking must know human nature 
through the entire gamut of its capacities 
and powers. His chief work is that of 
liberation. He must set the captive free. 
It is often said that preachers should 
speak naturally ; but ah, there's the rub ! 
Not one man in ten speaks naturally 
unless he has been trained. Men are 
all bound round and tied up with bad 
habits, and the teacher of elocution must 
untie the knots. The mental excitement 
caused by appearing before an audience 
leads men to do all sorts of curious and 
unnatural things with the muscles of the 
arms and throat, and simply to be himself 
a man needs a competent instructor. 

Indeed, that is about all the voice teacher 
has to do. It is not for him to dictate to 
his students where they shall place their 
emphasis or when they shall make their 
gestures. His work is to set all the 
muscles free that the soul may be at lib- 



136 The Minister as Prophet 

erty to do unimpeded what it will. The 
hand must be set free so that the fingers 
shall not be tied, and the arms must be 
freed that gestures may not proceed from 
the elbow, and the lower jaw must be 
liberated that the tones may not be 
squeezed, and the constrictions must all 
be taken from the throat that the voice 
may not be cramped, and the muscles of 
the back must be relaxed that the tones 
may not lack sweetness, volume, and depth, 
and all the muscles of the chest must be 
trained that the tones may not be breathy ; 
in short, there is scarcely a muscle in the 
body which may not help or mar the voice, 
and the teacher of vocal culture, stripping 
off all these fetters, says to the prisoner, 
" Come forth." An elocution teacher who 
understands his business is one of the best 
friends a student of theology can have. 

That there is riot in every theological 
seminary of America a competent and 
well-paid professor of voice culture is a 
scandal for which we ought to hang our 



Form and Manner 137 

heads in shame. When one thinks of the 
hundreds of preachers who are all the 
time troubled with their throats, and of 
the scores who break down altogether, 
and of the long-suffering congregations 
listening to uncultivated voices of men 
upon whose tongue the Gospel becomes a 
nasal or a rasping thing, irritating where 
it ought to soothe, and wounding where 
it ought to heal, one feels like hurling 
thunderbolts of wrath against the system 
of theological training by which this awful 
tragedy is made possible to this present 
hour. 

A few words of counsel are all that can 
be given : — 

1. Never put on a tone. Let every 
tone be sincere. Every affectation in the 
pulpit subtracts from the preacher's 
power. If you use an oily tone, or a sanc- 
timonious tone, or a whining tone, or a 
graveyard tone, you are making yourself 
unnatural and closing the hearts of your 
hearers against you. 



138 The Minister as Prophet 

2. Avoid the devil of monotony. Its 
name is legion. There is a monotony of 
rate and one of pitch and one of em- 
phasis and one of force and one of accent 
and one of cadence, and not one of the 
unhallowed brood will come out even by 
prayer and fasting. Nothing but a teacher 
will answer in dealing with diseases of the 
voice. The reason is that for the voice 
there is no looking-glass, and no man can 
safely trust his ear. The most terrible 
and patent defects will escape the keenest 
man alive until they are pointed out by an 
acute-eared teacher. 

3. Do not overdo. Delsarte never said 
a brighter thing than this, " Mediocrity is 
not the too little, but the too much. ,, It is 
one of those profound sayings which be- 
come the better appreciated the longer 
they are pondered. All second-rate sing- 
ers overdo. They make too great an 
effort. They squirm and twist and make 
wry faces, and give the impression that 
singing is a tremendous feat. Great 



Form and Manner 139 

singers sing with consummate ease. Sec- 
ond and third-rate actors always overdo. 
They put on too much. We call them 
stagey and theatrical, and pass them by, 
while we give our attention to the star, 
who, if he is of the first magnitude, is so 
natural we feel we could act that well 
ourself. 

Second-rate preachers always overdo. 
They use too many adjectives, too many 
gestures, too many ideas, too much 
force. They pound the pulpit, and this 
invariably pushes the people farther off. 
You cannot pound an idea into the hu- 
man mind. An idea is a flower. You 
can shake its perfume on the air, but that 
requires no bluster. An idea is a jewel. 
You can twirl it before your congregation, 
that the light of every facet may fall upon 
the eye, but that requires no muscle. 
Even if you count an idea a projectile, 
which is to be fired into the substance of 
the soul, even then it is possible to use too 
much force. When they first made the 



140 The Minister as Prophet 

great projectiles with which to sink a 
battleship, they tipped them with the 
hardest steel, and found that by the im- 
pact the projectile was shattered to pieces. 
It was later on discovered that by tipping 
them with softer metal the projectiles had 
greater penetrating power, and, instead of 
breaking into pieces, plowed deep into 
the plates of solid steel. If you want to 
get a great truth deep into the human 
heart, then tip it with a gentle tone. 

4. Be sensible. Remember that a con- 
gregation is nothing but a man. It is not 
a colossus to be attacked by rhetorical 
bludgeons, or a baby to be tickled by 
vocal pyrotechnics, or a monster to be 
tricked and trapped by oratorical strata- 
gems and devices. To speak to a man, 
you must be one yourself. Never en- 
deavor to be eloquent. It may be that 
God will let you be eloquent a half dozen 
times in your life, but I am sure you can- 
not be eloquent if you try to be. And 
never declaim. Declamation makes a 



Form and Manner 141 

noise and interests the children, but 
grown-up people care nothing for it. 
There is nothing more monotonous than 
steady declamation, unless it be continu- 
ous eloquence. And do not struggle to 
make an impression. If you do, you will 
not make the kind of impression that you 
want to make. And when the sermon is 
over, never run round and ask what sort 
of an impression the sermon made. Only 
an imbecile would be excusable for asking 
a question so unutterably silly. And when 
you go to bed, do not lie awake and worry 
about the impression that you made or did 
not make. 

A man must speak his message, tak- 
ing care that it be clear and true, and 
then leave all the impressions in the 
hand of God. The fact is, no preacher 
knows what impressions are the deepest 
or just when or where they are made. In 
walking through the woods after a storm, 
we hear the creaking of a broken branch, 
and by and by, with terrific thunder, it 



142 The Minister as Prophet 

comes crashing down across the path. It 
startles us, but we do not bring it home. 
But on our return we discover a bur stick- 
ing to our garment. When and where we 
got it we do not know. We passed it, we 
touched it, it clung to us, it seized us with- 
out hurrah and clamor, and unknowingly 
we brought it home. So it is with truth. 
The sermons that rattle and thunder are 
not the sermons that stay with us longest. 
They startle and they excite a momentary 
wonder, but we do not bring them home. 
The truths which we are carrying with us to 
our eternal home are truths which we have 
passed near at some point or other along 
our earthly pilgrimage, and they, touching 
us, have stuck to us ; and because the spirit 
of God is in them, they keep clinging to 
us and we to them, although we cannot 
tell just how or when or why they and we 
first came together. Scatter God's truths 
through your congregation, and rest as- 
sured that some one will carry one of them 
home! 



Form and Manner 143 

5. Be yourself. You are strong only 
when you are yourself. You are per- 
suasive only when you speak in your 
mother tongue, and of those things which 
you yourself do know. If you walk on 
the stilts of other men's high phrases, or 
wrap yourself in the embroidered language 
of men of genius long since dead, you 
will be as impotent as David was the 
day he fitted on Saul's armor. Use the 
pebble taken from the brook which flows 
by your door. Use the sling which you 
have used from boyhood and which be- 
longs to you by the will of God. Let 
other men preach as they will, you preach 
as you must. True to yourself, speaking 
as you are led, the Gospel on your lips 
will have an accent which it has never 
had before since the world began, — an 
accent needed to fill out the music of 
the full-toned proclamation of the good 
news of God. 

6. Be natural. This is the sum of the 
whole matter. Do not push the voice 



144 The Minister as Prophet 

into clerical cadences, but let it flow out 
of an open throat, breaking into syllables 
which tell truly what you think and feel. 
Do not push the language into inflated 
and bombastic forms, but let it flow as 
naturally as a brook through one of God's 
own green meadows. Do not shove the 
thought into artificial altitudes, but let 
it move along the level on which you 
do your ordinary thinking. If you are 
altogether natural, you will become invis- 
ible. Style is perfect when it cannot be 
seen. Jesus was a perfect speaker. There 
is no recorded criticism of his style. Men 
would have criticised it had they seen 
it, but they never saw it. They saw 
nothing but his thought. Some men 
saw it, and their souls were filled with 
rapture. Others saw it, and they were 
stung to madness and fiery indignation. 
Men simmered and sizzled as he spoke, 
muttering to themselves, talking to one 
another, crying out by way of approba- 
tion or condemnation. Every one boiled 



Form and Manner 145 

over, some with love, and some with hate, 
so mighty was his speaking. He is the 
model for us all. A preacher really great 
speaks the Gospel so simply and so truly 
that all the congregation, looking toward 
him, see no man but Jesus only. 



V 

The Place of Dogma in Preaching 

The phrasing of my subject seems to 
take it for granted that there is a place 
for dogma in preaching. This, I know, 
is rather a hazardous assumption, for 
there are men in large numbers, intelli- 
gent and influential and Christian, who be- 
lieve that there is no place whatever for 
dogma in the Christian religion. Chris- 
tianity, they say, is a matter of feeling, 
a thing of the spirit; the bond of union 
is sentiment, not thought, and as soon as 
you introduce dogma you give occasion 
for differences and contentions and bitter- 
ness of heart. These men carry us down 
the centuries and show us how generation 
after generation has been teased and 
fretted into ugliness and torn into fac- 
146 



The Place of Dogma in Preaching 147 

tional shreds by the everlasting disputa- 
tion concerning dogma, and turning their 
back upon it, they shun it as the black 
beast of Christian history. These, of 
course, are extremists. 

There are others who are ready to ac- 
knowledge that there is a place for 
dogma ; it belongs to the study of the 
theologian, the den of the philosopher, 
the schoolroom where professor and stu- 
dent meet, the library of the minister ; 
but it has no place in the pulpit toward 
which worn and wearied mortals look on 
Sunday morning for a guiding and a heal- 
ing word amid the temptations and tribu- 
lations of the crowded and bewildering 
days. 

The time has come when dogma is 
everywhere spoken against. Do not the 
novelists go out of their way to sneer at it ? 
Some of their brightest things are said 
in disparagement of it. Magazine writers 
toss it aside with a superior smile as though 
it belonged to the pile of exploded super- 



148 The Minister as Prophet 

stitions. The editors and reporters tear 
the doctrines and creeds into tatters and 
twit the minister on the fact that the world 
is interested no longer in his dogmas. 
Lords and ladies of high society say with 
supercilious disdain that they care nothing 
at all for the " dogmas " of the church. 
The unbelievers and freethinkers grow 
furious in the presence of these dogmas 
and pour out upon them the vials of their 
wrath, trampling them beneath their feet 
as the muddy sediment of a stream of 
superstition, black crystals of bigotry and 
hate. Tennyson has sketched the typical 
man of to-day in his lines : — 

" I take possession of man's mind and deed ; 
I care not what the sects may brawl ; 
I sit as God holding no form of creed, 
But contemplating all." 

Now there is nothing new in the fact 
that the world is opposed to Christian 
dogma, for it has been so from the be- 
ginning. Ever since the days of Saul 
of Tarsus the dogmas of the Christian 



The Place of Dogma in Preaching 149 

church have seemed to one type of men 
a stumbling-block and to another type 
of men they have been sheer foolish- 
ness. The novel feature of the present 
situation is that the disparagement of 
dogma has been taken up by members 
of the Christian church. Christian authors 
of Christian volumes speak contemptu- 
ously of creeds. The president of a well- 
known college begins a book with the 
assertion that the current creed of Chris- 
tendom is a chaos of contradictions. 
Christian editors of Christian papers do 
not hesitate to speak of doctrines as though 
they were matters of slight concern. Chris- 
tian men and Christian women and Chris- 
tian scholars say openly that they do not 
care for doctrinal preaching, and with the 
crowd they shout, " Away with your 
dogmas ! " Here and there you will find 
a preacher who, yielding to the Zeitgeist, 
falls in with the prevailing fad and rails 
against dogma too. Dogma is " a monster 
of such frightful mien, as to be hated needs 



150 The Minister as Prophet 

but to be seen." Some men cannot even 
pronounce the word without an ictus that 
is acid. 

Certainly such a world-wide movement 
demands careful consideration. No such 
fashion would ever have taken hold of 
the hearts of men had there not been 
powerful reasons. Why is it that there is 
a tendency nowadays to depreciate the 
value of dogma? 

1. We are living in a new world. The 
world has been recreated within seventy- 
five years. There is a new atmosphere, a 
new temper, a new perspective, a new 
viewpoint, a new emphasis, new instru- 
ments, new apparatus ; all the old horizons 
of knowledge have disappeared, new worlds 
have swum into our ken, and a desolat- 
ing humility has fallen on a large section 
of the Christian world. Our fathers lived 
in a much smaller world than ours. 
They could close every sentence with a 
period ; we are obliged to use the inter- 
rogation point. For a generation min- 



The Place of Dogma in Preaching 151 

isters have been repeating in the pul- 
pit:— 

"Our little systems have their day, 

They have their day and cease to be, 
They are but broken lights of Thee, 
And thou, O Lord, art more than they. 

" We have but faith, we cannot know, 
For knowledge is of things we see. 
And yet we trust it comes from Thee, 
A beam in darkness, let it grow." 

This has been the sentiment of some of 
the boldest spirits, while many more in- 
tense and more earnest have been driven 

to exclaim : — 

"What am I? 
An infant crying in the night — 
An infant crying for the light — 
And with no language but a cry." 

In the presence of the immeasurable 
spaces and the illimitable forces which 
modern science has disclosed, many a 
heroic spirit has prostrated itself in the 
dust, saying, in answer to all the questions 
which religion suggests : " I do not know ! 
I do not know ! " In an age so largely 
ruled by the agnostic spirit, it seems out 



152 The Minister as Prophet 

of place to be dogmatic. Who can be cer- 
tain in a world where so many men are 
doubtful ? Dogma seems to be an anach- 
ronism in our modern life. It is a mark 
of culture to speak in hesitant and apolo- 
getic phrases. With men all around us all 
at sea it becomes us to hold our opinions 
also in suspense. To be certain or to 
know is to get ourself written down a 
prig. 

2. With the new world have come new 
problems, and these problems seem to be 
beyond the reach of dogma. Steam and 
electricity have created a new industrial 
world. Populations are massing them- 
selves more and more in colossal cities. 
All our social problems have been multi- 
plied enormously. How to live together 
— this is the problem of our day. In the 
rush and push and strife of modern city * 
life there is so much injustice, so much 
dishonesty, so much cruelty, so much 
suffering ; lust and drunkenness and 
greed create such terrible tragedies that 



The Place of Dogma in Preaching 153 

religious men are saying, " We must 
grapple with these awful problems ; we 
must front these pressing perils and let 
the dogmas go.'' And so men are build- 
ing institutional churches and parish 
houses and college settlements, and phil- 
anthropic agencies are multiplied and 
extended. Every one nowadays believes 
in institutions which deal directly with the 
social wants and needs of men. Money 
is being poured out like water to feed 
the hungry, to clothe the naked, and to 
teach the fingers of the ignorant ways of 
earning bread, and to this grand work 
many a man goes jauntily forward, say- 
ing, " I believe in social service ; let the 
dogmas go." 

3. The new age is irenic. The past 
has been filled with controversy and con- 
tention, with bitterness and war. When 
we read the awful record the head grows 
faint and the heart sick. The spirit of 
our times cries out : Let us have peace. 
Let us forget the points on which we 



154 The Minister as Prophet 

differ and think only on the points in 
which we all agree. Let all the evangel- 
ical churches come together and let the 
Unitarians come in too, and let the Jews 
come in also, and let us receive also the 
disciples of ethical culture — let us throw 
away the dogmas on which we differ, and 
let us think henceforth and forever only 
of the things on which we can agree. 
This means, of course, throwing over- 
board the distinctive dogmas of the 
Christian religion — but let them go, if 
only by casting them away we can have 
peace. Our good nature extends even to 
the ends of the earth. We are no longer 
the critics of the Oriental religions. We 
are willing to admit that Confucianism 
and Buddhism and Mohammedanism and 
Shintoism are all earnest strivings of the 
human spirit after God ; that they all 
have in them many beautiful and noble 
sentiments and precepts, and why should 
not the followers of all the religions of the 
earth get together and sit at one another's 



The Place of Dogma in Preaching 155 

feet, culling out the things upon which 
they are all agreed, and out of these 
constructing the one universal and final 
religion ? This means, of course, letting 
the distinctive dogmas of the Christian 
religion go — but why not let them go 
if we can have a world-wide peace ? So 
many men are saying. 

4. The value of dogma as a dynamic 
is becoming increasingly doubtful. Ralph 
Waldo Emerson threw over the dogmas 
of the church one after the other, but he 
remained a saint to the end of his days. 
One of the most orthodox of all evangel- 
ical preachers, Father Taylor, declared 
that he had never known so good a 
Christian as Ralph Waldo Emerson. If 
Ralph Waldo Emerson could get on with- 
out dogma, why should not all men be 
able to do the same ? Only recently a 
writer stated in the Independent that 
decadence in church attendance causes 
no decadence in morals, that many of the 
best people she knows no longer care to 



156 The Minister as Prophet 

go to church ; and in order to prove her 
contention she cited the fact that the 
leader of the reform movement in New 
York City never goes to church. Christ- 
mas morning of last year an editorial 
writer in one of the New York dailies 
said that while the incarnation to many 
minds had passed from the realm of faith 
to the region of poetic imagination, never- 
theless the idealism of Christmas remains. 
The fact that the Christian spirit seems 
to abide after the Christian dogmas have 
been denied is leading increasing numbers 
of people to feel that we can safely 
dispense with the dogmatic features of 
Christianity, keeping only its beautiful 
spirit. 

To many minds the virgin birth is 
passing from the realm of dogma to the 
realm of fancy — let it pass, — it is a 
lovely picture and has done the world im- 
measurable good. The miracles of Jesus 
are passing from the realm of fact to 
the realm of myth, but let them pass, — 



The Place of Dogma in Preaching 157 

they have done the world a service. The 
resurrection of Jesus is passing from the 
realm of history to the realm of halluci- 
nation, but let it pass, — it has helped men 
to believe that all men rise. The incar- 
nation is passing from the realm of faith 
to the realm of imagination — but let it 
go, — we should praise the men who were 
able to entertain so poetic an idea. And 
so men are throwing away the virgin birth, 
the miracles, the resurrection, the trin- 
ity, the incarnation, redemption through 
Christ's blood, the new birth, heaven, 
hell, and saying, the Sermon on the 
Mount is enough. Others, bolder still, 
say the Golden Rule is sufficient — give 
us this and we have all we need. 

5. In our crowded city life there seems 
to be no time or place for dogma. A city 
picks up a man Monday morning, drives 
him like a slave through the week, throws 
him into Sunday jaded and wrecked. If 
the man can get away from his work at 
night, he goes to some banquet and listens 



158 The Minister as Prophet 

to speeches that are facetious and witty. 
On Sunday he is so jaded and fagged that 
he says, Give me a little good music, and 
for heaven's sake make the sermon short. 
In many cases the good-natured preacher 
obeys, and the Christians of our large 
cities are not getting the instruction which 
their fathers received. The children in 
many cases grow up to be ignorant of the 
creed of the church, and when they go to 
college are discovered to be as ignorant of 
the scriptures as though they were Hotten- 
tots. Men and women nourished in ortho- 
dox households are ready to be swept 
along by Dowieism, esoteric Buddhism, 
Christian Science, or any other insanity 
or delusion of the hour. It was noted 
by many that the man whose name stood 
at the head of the list of the supporters 
of the beautiful new Christian Science 
Church on Central Park West was the 
son of one of the most illustrious of 
the Presbyterian families of that city. 
The false Christs of our day get their 



The Place of Dogma in Preaching 159 

devotees, not from the world, but from 
the churches of evangelical Christendom. 
Possibly there never has been a time 
when there have been so many and such 
subtle temptations to reduce the Chris- 
tian religion to an ethical code. Never 
have there been so many reverent and 
distinguished and religious men willing 
to do that as just now. Give us the 
surface facts. Give us a quick lunch, 
cries the pew, and the pulpit with alacrity 
obeys. 

I ask you to look at two facts. 
The first fact is that through a larger 
part of the Christian world there is a 
spiritual deadness which is appalling. 
Our English brethren when they visit 
us go home and talk about us, and this is 
what they say about American preachers. 
They say we are a very bright and learned 
set, we are intensely intellectual, we know 
a lot of things, but we are not spiritual, — 
we are lacking in spiritual passion. If we 
are to believe what we read in the papers, 



160 The Minister as Prophet 

certainly the churches of America are 
lacking in enthusiasm and fervor. The 
motions are still gone through with, but 
the fires of enthusiasm have died down. 
A few hopeful souls still tell us there is 
to be a revival, but the revival has not 
yet arrived. Masses of our population 
have drifted out of reach of the church. 
Those who attend religious services are 
allowing their church-going to become in- 
creasingly desultory and spasmodic. No 
one who knows the world as it is to- 
day in its temper and its inmost spirit 
can deny that it is skeptical and cold, 
either altogether indifferent to or furi- 
ously antagonistic to the dogmas of the 
Christian faith. Our first fact, then, is 
a wide-spread spiritual desolation. We 
publish beautiful and elaborate social pro- 
grams, but for some reason we cannot 
carry them out. We have ink, but lack 
power. 

The second fact is a decadence in doc- 
trinal preaching. I suppose the fact that 



The Place of Dogma in Preaching 161 

there has been such decadence would 
hardly be denied by any one. Surely 
the dogmas of the Christian church are 
not presented to the people with anything 
like the clearness, the coherency, or the 
passion with which they were presented 
to people fifty years ago. In many a 
Christian pulpit the dogmas have been 
slowly disappearing. Occasionally a man 
stands up and boldly says: "We leave 
the cross behind us, but let us guard the 
sacred fire ; we cast off dogma, but we 
keep enthusiasm. Let the old statements 
go. The incarnation — let it be not special 
but general, all men are begotten of God. 
Redemption — let it be merged in the 
thought of continuous creation. The 
atonement — let us make it a universal 
law." Such a man gets into the papers, 
creates a wide-spread commotion, goes up 
like a rocket, and comes down like a stick. 
That is not the kind of heretic of whom 
we need be afraid in our day and genera- 
tion. The insidious heretic of our day is 



1 62 The Minister as Prophet 

the man who quietly drops dogma out of 
his preaching and says nothing about it. 
Robert Louis Stevenson was right when 
he said that the damning sins are the sins 
of omission. That is what Jesus himself 
said. 

And however it may be with other 
men, surely the damning sins of preachers 
are the sins of omission. It is not the 
things which a minister does, but the 
things which he does not do which carry 
him to perdition. A minister in our day 
can get on very well without dogma. 
Books are numerous and cheap, and he 
has a mass of poetry and a mass of fic- 
tion and a mass of science and a mass of 
sociology from which it is possible for him 
to draw. He can give his sermon the 
Christian atmosphere and let a stream 
of Christian sentiment trickle through its 
paragraphs and keep to the front the 
Christian ethical ideals, without even so 
much as once referring to those funda- 
mental dogmas by which the church of 



The Place of Dogma in Preaching 163 

God lifted the Roman Empire off its 
hinges, and turned the stream of the 
centuries into a new channel. There is 
a vast mass of preaching which is not 
dogmatic. These, then, are the two facts : 
There is wide-spread spiritual desolation 
and wide-spread indifference to dogma. 
Is there a connection between these two 
facts ? I think there is. 

And so I stand here to enter a plea for 
dogma in preaching. There is a place for 
it, and its place is the foremost place. 
The man who would be a great preacher 
is the man who keeps dogma at the front. 

1. Let us ask ourselves first of all 
what dogma is. We cannot do better than 
to accept the definition of Dr. James Orr, 
and say that dogma is doctrine clearly 
stated and ecclesiastically sanctioned. If 
this be a correct definition, then certainly 
everybody must believe in Dogma. Sa- 
battier is right when he says that a religion 
without doctrine is a thing essentially con- 
tradictory. And Harnack is not mistaken 



164 The Minister as Prophet 

when he asserts that Christianity without 
dogma, without a clear expression of its 
content, is inconceivable. If the intellect 
has anything at all to do with a man's re- 
ligion, if the first great commandment is, 
" Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with 
all thy heart and soul and mind and 
strength,' ' then we must think to be genu- 
inely religious, and our thought must be 
worked out to clearness and coherency. 
And when thus worked out and sanctioned 
by the body of believers, it is Christian 
dogma. 

2. Dogmatic teaching has always been 
a source of power. No men have ever 
left their mark upon this world who have 
not had a definite and clean-cut creed. 
Men often talk about the scientific spirit 
who do not know what the scientific spirit 
is. Science is as dogmatic as the church 
was in the mediaeval ages. Science has 
her creed, and its articles are clear and 
definite. The universality of law, the uni- 
versality of gravitation, the indestructibility 



The Place of Dogma in Preaching 165 

of matter, the conservation of energy, or- 
ganic evolution, the age of ice, the undula- 
tory nature of light, — these are articles of 
her creed which she repeats in all her 
temples, and which she proclaims as one 
having authority. It is because she has a 
creed and because she speaks dogmatically 
that she has filled the modern world with 
her wonders. 

The high priests of science are all 
of them without exception dogmatists. 
Tyndall, Huxley, Spencer, and all the 
rest of them have been as dogmatic as 
the apologists of the second century were. 
That has been characteristic of all the 
mightiest opponents of the Christian 
church. They have all had a creed and 
been able to meet the faith of the Chris- 
tian church by clear and coherent dogmas. 
We are living in a scientific age, and men 
demand above all things else clearness, co- 
herency, definiteness. What a tragedy it 
is that when science is speaking in such 
clear and positive tones, so many of the 



1 66 The Minister as Prophet 

preachers of the Gospel should be speaking 
with hesitant voices and blowing the bugle 
with a sound so uncertain that men do not 
know whether or not to prepare for battle. 
What the men in our theological semina- 
ries need most of all is a thorough ground- 
ing in theology. Men in a scientific age 
want science; theology is the science of 
God. If some men are not ashamed to give 
their life to the study of the science of the 
stars, and others to the study of the science 
of flowers, and others to the science of 
rocks, and others to the science of bugs, 
shame on the Lord's anointed if they are 
ashamed to give themselves to the contin- 
uous and passionate study of the science 
of the Eternal. It is calamitous that in an 
age filled with vast confusions and multi- 
tudinous speculations so many ministers 
of the Gospel should be capable of nothing 
but clouded phrases and declarations that 
are lacking in the music of final and incon- 
trovertible truth. When we are met on 
every side by ideas as sharp as lances and 



The Place of Dogma in Preaching 167 

solid as spears, we cannot conquer with 
hands filled with mist or with mush. 

3. One of the mightiest forces of our 
times is socialism. This is a force which 
men have already learned to fear, and 
with which the world is bound to reckon 
by and by. Karl Marx was the greatest 
dogmatist which Germany has produced 
within the last hundred years. He had 
ideas and he thought them out to clear- 
ness, and he stated them in language 
which burns like a thousand torches, and 
he has kindled all over the world fires 
that are burning like subterranean fur- 
naces down deep in the hot souls of men. 
In the world of socialism there are hero- 
isms and self-abnegations and willingness 
to suffer, and idealisms which remind one 
of the days of the apostolic church. With 
such passionate intensity of devotion and 
such lofty dreams of the future that shall 
be, I do not wonder that socialism is 
looked upon with alarm, and that many 
socialists are hated with the same fear as 



1 68 The Minister as Prophet 

the followers of the crucified Nazarene 
were hated two thousand years ago. 

4. One of the colossal facts of Chris- 
tian history is Roman Catholicism. Her 
victories are amazing. Her power is stu- 
pendous. She has retained her grip upon 
the minds and consciences of men through 
the storms and changes of more than a 
thousand years, and that grip is not yet 
broken. She has done it because she has 
been from first to last dogmatic. She has 
a few ideas which are as clear as crystal 
and which she builds up in the minds of 
men by patient teaching through the 
generations. One of those dogmas is the 
dogma of the church. The church is a 
divine institution intrusted with the. right 
to guide and rule the hearts and homes of 
men. The second is the dogma of tran- 
substantiation, the dogma that God is 
actually present on the altar in the sacri- 
fice of the mass. These two dogmas can- 
not be questioned by any faithful Catholic 
anywhere on the earth. ' They are taught 



The Place of Dogma in Preaching 169 

in all languages, and without a quiver in 
the voice of the instructing priest ; and 
because those dogmas are taught and 
accepted, nearly three hundred thousand 
Roman Catholics on the little island of 
Manhattan travel to the house of prayer 
every Sunday morning in the early hours, 
when Protestants are too tired to get out 
of bed, — over twice as many as all the 
Protestant church-goers put together, not- 
withstanding the Protestant population 
outnumbers that of the Roman Catholic. 
And all this is made possible by the per- 
sistent, patient, everlasting teaching of 
dogmas. 

Protestantism in her origin was also dog- 
matic. Martin Luther was born a Roman 
Catholic, was educated by the Catholic 
church, spent years in a Roman Catholic 
monastery. He was not afraid of dogma, 
and by means of his dogma of justifica- 
tion by faith, he tore Germany from the 
grip of the Pope and shook the civilized 
world. 



170 The Minister as Prophet 

What more dogmatic preachers have 
ever lived than the Presbyterians of Scot- 
land and the Congregationalists of New 
England? By this dogmatic preaching 
both countries were lifted to thrones of 
power, and are known in history as seats 
of the mighty. Stalwart thinkers of God's 
truth, they did not hesitate to express it in 
language which gripped the consciences 
of men. It is the glory of the Reformed 
branches of Protestantism, and the feature 
in their life which makes my heart rejoice 
is that from the days of John Calvin down 
to the present generation their leaders 
have everywhere and always presented a 
compact body of truth, which has passed 
like iron into the blood of men. The doc- 
trine of divine sovereignty thought out to 
clearness and consistency, even though 
overdeveloped on one side to the verge of 
cruelty, will bring men nearer to God than 
will the idea of the divine fatherhood ex- 
pressed in vague and wandering phrases 
by minds which have not thought out 



The Place of Dogma in Preaching 171 

what divine parenthood necessitates and 
implies. 

The mightiest Protestant church of our 
modern world is the Methodist. Method- 
ism owes its power to a dogma. It was on 
a certain evening in the month of May, in 
the year 1738, that John Wesley, attend- 
ing a religious service in London, while 
listening to the exposition of one of St. 
Paul's letters, felt his heart strangely 
warmed. The fire that was kindled that 
night in John Wesley's heart started a 
spiritual conflagration which put an end to 
the age of ice. On both sides the sea a 
dead church was brought to life again by 
the preaching of men whose lips had been 
touched with a coal from off God's altar, 
and who had learned by their own expe- 
rience that it is possible for a man to be 
born from above. " Ye must be born 
again;" that is preeminently the dogma 
of Methodism. 

As it has been the last four hundred 
years so it was at the beginning. The apol- 



172 The Minister as Prophet 

ogists of the second and third centuries were 
stalwart and uncompromising dogmatists. 
How easy it would have been for Ignatius 
and Polycarp and Justin Martyr and the 
rest of them to have said, We will let the 
dogmas go; all we desire is that men should 
be good. But no, they chose rather to die 
than forego the joy of bearing testimony 
to the fact that Christ died and rose again. 
The world was full of specious philosophies, 
and men were going up and down the 
lands teaching in elegant and rhetorical 
phrases the beauty of being good. Vast 
errors were abroad, protean in shape and 
cyclopean in power, and these followers of 
Jesus might have avoided controversy and 
saved themselves from the stake if they 
had only been willing to forget the things 
on which they differed from other men 
and dwell upon the things on which all 
good men were agreed. It was the 
dogmas of the Christian faith which brought 
them to the fire and opened the gates of 
heaven. 



The Place of Dogma in Preaching 173 

Moreover, the new preaching of Chris- 
tianity with Christian dogma eliminated 
does not seem to be working well. Never 
have preachers preached so many sermons 
on the brotherhood of man, and never has 
that phrase been so often on human lips as 
within the last fifty years, and yet never 
since our republic was founded has race 
hatred burned with greater intensity than 
it is burning now ; never have labor and 
capital been farther apart, and never has 
the chasm between rich and poor, high and 
low, cultivated and ignorant, been wider 
and deeper; never have the unchurched 
masses been more indifferent to the church 
than to-day. Applied Christianity has 
been our theme ; but alas, we have had too 
little Christianity to apply. 

It begins to look as though there must 
be some fallacy in the argument that all 
we want is the words of Jesus. Again 
and again the changes have been rung on 
the thesis : " Let us take the words of Jesus 
and let us shape our life by them. Men 



174 The Minister as Prophet 

will never agree upon the dogmas of the 
church, but upon the words of Jesus all 
good men are at one. No matter who 
he was, how he came, or how he w r ent, 
what he said was beautiful and good. 
Let us live his life and obey his word, 
no matter whence he came." It ail sounds 
plausible enough, but when analyzed it 
is nothing but the talk of fools, for only 
fools take up the thoughts and follow the 
commands of strangers, not caring who 
the strangers are. If one commands me to 
go and preach his gospel, and if necessary 
lay down my life in the doing of it, I want 
to know first of all who he is and whether 
all power has been granted unto him both 
in heaven and on earth. 

The first question which meets a man 
who thinks is, Who is Jesus — is he 
mere man, apparition, chimera, emana- 
tion, deceiver, demigod, or God's only 
begotten Son who " for us men and for 
our salvation came down from heaven, 
and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of 



The Place of Dogma in Preaching 175 

the Virgin Mary and was made man " ? 
Who is he ? Has the church any clean- 
cut answer to that question ? Is it possible 
that she has lived her life and done her 
work for two thousand years and still is 
all at sea in regard to the person of the 
one she counts her Lord ? If she has a 
clean-cut conception of who and what he is, 
then that is dogma, and the dogma of 
Christ's person becomes the center of all 
effective and truly Christian preaching. 

The words of Jesus are indeed important, 
but chiefly because of the light they throw 
on Jesus' person. Take his words as so 
many ethical precepts and try to plant them 
in the stony hearts of men, and egregious 
and tragic failure is inevitable. No such 
blunder was committed by the apostles. 
They knew the words of Jesus, but they 
did not rely upon them for the conversion 
of the world. It is remarkable that Peter 
uses hardly any of the words of Jesus in 
his letters. Neither does John, neither 
does James. Even Paul quotes him only 



176 The Minister as Prophet 

twice, and then to the extent of scarcely a 
dozen words. " I am determined to know 
Christ, not his parables or his discourses, 
his maxims or his speeches, but the Lord 
himself who loved me and gave himself for 
me." 

Paul's one ambition was to know him, 
and the power of his resurrection, and 
the fellowship of his suffering being 
made conformable unto his death. It is 
Christ who is the hope of glory. It is 
Christ in whom we can do all things. For 
him to live is Christ, and to die is gain, be- 
cause death will tighten the union between 
his soul and Christ. It is not the words of 
Jesus which Paul treasures and extols, but 
the life that is hid with Christ in God. It 
is not the words of Jesus, but the dogma 
of the incarnation which is the center of 
Paul's theology and the crown and glory 
of all his preaching. Harnack is falla- 
cious when in the Contemporary Review 
of April, 1903, he says, "It is more impor- 
tant to ponder on the words, ' If ye love 



The Place of Dogma in Preaching 177 

me, ye will keep my commandments/ and 
to order our lives in conformity with them 
than to press the inscrutable and venerable 
formulas.'' 

Yes, but to order our lives in con- 
formity with the words of Jesus — ah, 
there's the rub ! Unless we die with him 
how can we rise with him, unless we suffer 
with him how can we reign with him, and 
what will induce us to suffer with him 
except our belief in him as one who, exist- 
ing "in the form of God, counted not the 
being on an equality with God, a thing to 
be grasped, but emptied himself, taking 
the form of a servant, being made in the 
likeness of men ; and, being found in 
fashion as a man, he humbled himself, 
becoming obedient unto death, — yea, the 
death of the cross." 

" Religion," says Matthew Arnold, is 
" morality touched with emotion, lit up 
and enkindled and made much more pow- 
erful by emotion." Yes, but how is one to 
get the emotion ? Whence is it to come ? 



178 The Minister as Prophet 

Not from beautiful precepts such as "Love 
your enemies/' or " Love your neighbor as 
yourself/' or " If you would save your life, 
lose it," but from the loving heart of a per- 
son who becomes the life of our life and 
the love of our love. Men are not saved by 
words, but by a person. What they need 
is a restored relationship to God. Only as 
we can persuade them that God is in Christ 
reconciling the world to himself does the 
fire burn on the altar, and human brother- 
hood become possible. Every man of 
power in the pulpit from Ignatius down to 
Dwight L. Moody has been mighty in his 
dogmatism. Seizing clean-cut definite 
truths which have received the sanction of 
the body of believers, they have so pressed 
these upon the hearts of their hearers as 
to make them the power of God unto 
salvation to every one willing to believe. 
When, therefore, a good ministerial 
brother in the Outlook asks, "Is not belief 
in the unceasing presence of a divine in- 
telligence active in power and boundless in 



The Place of Dogma in Preaching 179 

love enough ? " the answer is No ! It is 
Christ and him crucified which forms the 
preacher's message, and leaving Christ out 
he abdicates the high position to which he 
has been called. A preacher must have 
impulse, power, and passion, — these three, 
and all these three come only in fullest 
measure from the cross. The incarnation, 
the trinity, redemption through the blood 
of Christ, immortality through union with 
the Son of God, the Christian church, 
Christ's body, — these are not golden-tinted 
exhalations floating on the surface of the 
great river of human speculation, bubbles 
to be toyed with for a season and blown to 
nothingness by the gales of a scientific age ; 
they are outcroppings of the Eternal 
granite on which the universe is built. 
Blessed is the preacher who plants his feet 
on these ! A pulpit built on these is built 
on rock, and no matter how the winds may 
blow or the rains descend, that pulpit will 
stand forever ! 

When we open our New Testament 



180 The Minister as Prophet 

we are ushered at once into the presence 
of a company of dogmatists. Not one of 
them is vague or limp or gelatinous. Lis- 
ten to Simon Peter preaching to the peo- 
ple of Jerusalem, " There is no name 
under heaven which is given among men 
wherein ye must be saved." Oh, the nar- 
rowness of the man ! The temper of 
Peter was the temper of all. Listen to 
the man who lay with his head on Jesus' 
bosom in the upper chamber at the last 
supper: " Who is the liar but he that 
denieth that Jesus is the Christ ? He is 
antichrist that denieth the Father and 
the Son. Whosoever denieth the Son 
hath not the Father." And Paul is like 
John. Listen to him as he writes to the 
Galatians, " Though an angel from heaven 
preached any other Gospel to you than 
that which we have preached unto you, 
let him be accursed." And fearing that 
some one in the church might think that 
he was heated and hasty he says, " Now 
let me say that again." 



The Place of Dogma in Preaching 181 

Wherever Paul went he preached dogma. 
He says to the Roman world, " I am not 
ashamed of the Gospel." There were a 
thousand reasons why he might have been 
ashamed of it. The idea that a dead Jew 
should qome to life again, get up out of 
his grave, and by and by float upward into 
the clouds was apparently about the most 
silly and preposterous story that one man 
could tell to another. And this was the 
story that St. Paul had to tell, and he 
says, I am not ashamed of it. Why, 
Paul, were you not ashamed? Because 
it is the power of God unto salvation to 
every one that believes. Whenever he 
writes a letter he puts dogma first and 
ethics second. The first eleven chapters 
of his letter to the Romans are dogmatic. 
After he has laid down his dogmas he 
is ready for his ethics. " I beseech you 
therefore, brethren, by the mercies of 
God — " Or take the fifteenth chapter 
of i Corinthians — that immortal argu- 
ment for the resurrection. 



1 82 The Minister as Prophet 

Round by round he climbs until at the 
top he shouts, " Therefore, my beloved 
brethren. " It is only when we stand on 
the dogma of the resurrection that we have 
power sufficient to enable us to be immov- 
able, and to always abound in the work of 
the Lord. Or take his letter to the Ephe- 
sians; the first three chapters are dog- 
matic. After the dogmas are stated, 
" I therefore beseech you that ye walk 
worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are 
called. ,, Or take his letter to the Philip- 
pians, " Let this mind be in you which 
was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in 
the form of God, thought it not robbery 
to be equal with God, made himself of 
no reputation, and took upon him the 
form of a servant." It is after looking 
once more at the face of Christ that he 
ventures to tell the Philippians what they 
ought to do. 

When he wants money he takes his 
stand upon dogma. " You remember the 
grace of our Lord Jesus, how that he 



The Place of Dogma in Preaching 183 

was rich, yet for your sakes he became 
poor, that ye through his poverty might 
be rich. ,, He did not ask people to 
give money because it was right, or 
because people were suffering, or be- 
cause it was a fine thing ethically for 
them to do. He stood on the incarnation 
whenever he asked for money. Or take 
his letter to the Colossians : "If ye be 
risen with Christ, seek those things which 
are above. Set your affection on things 
above, not on things on the earth, for 
ye are dead, and your life is hid with 
Christ in God." See how he buttresses 
his ethics both in front and behind by 
glowing visions of the risen Christ. That 
is the way to preach. No other kind of 
preaching is really Christian preaching. 

Where did the apostles get this dogmatic 
temper and this dogmatic habit? They 
got it from the Lord himself. He is the 
crowned dogmatist of history. Even the 
stupid people of his day could see that he 
was unlike all other teachers in that he 



184 The Minister as Prophet 

spoke as one having authority. " It hath 
been said by them of old time — but I say 
unto you — Other men have said this and 
that, but I say unto you — " He lifted 
himself above prophet, priest, and law- 
giver, above the exalted head of Moses 
himself. And lo, before men were aware 
of what he was doing, he had seated him- 
self on the throne of God. " Many will 
say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, and 
then will I say unto them, I never knew 
you." 

To his disciples in the upper chamber he 
said, " As my Father hath sent me, even 
so send I you." And what he said to them 
he says to us. Before the cloud received 
him from their sight, he said : " All power 
is given unto me, both in heaven and on 
earth — Go, therefore ! " He stood on 
dogma in issuing his commands. Without 
the dogma we have not the disposition or 
the power to go. I do not believe that a 
man has the right to preach the Gospel 
of the Son of God unless he can preach 



The Place of Dogma in Preaching 185 

dogmatically. It seems to me that the 
preacher is bound to know some things, 
and to know them thoroughly. I do not 
believe a man has a right to preach who 
cannot speak the great truths of the Chris- 
tian revelation in accents which do not 
waver and with an emphasis that burns 
with fervent heat. 

In saying all this I would not imply 
that everything is fixed down to the minut- 
est details. I would leave large spaces in 
which the human mind may work. Our 
fathers made the blunder of being certain 
on too many things. There is room for 
agnosticism within the area of well-defined 
limits. Christianity has its mysteries. 
Life's horizon is robed in mists, and the 
religion of the man of Galilee does not dis- 
sipate the mists. We see through a glass 
darkly, and no matter how much we know 
we know only in part. " It doth not yet 
appear what we shall be." In the heavens 
of the Christian world there are clouds of 
golden glory into which we look awestruck 



1 86 The Minister as Prophet 

and with eyes filled with wonder; but 
there are vast ranges of mountain truth 
whose glowing tops stand out sharp cut 
and glorious against the sky. These 
mountain ranges are the mysteries which 
were hidden from the foundation of the 
world and which have been revealed to us 
by God in Jesus Christ his Son. There 
are some things which we know, and the 
things which we know are the things 
which we must preach. Do we not know 
that God so loved the world that he gave 
his only begotten Son that whosoever 
believeth in him might not perish, but 
have eternal life ? Do we not know that 
Christ died for our sins and rose again for 
our justification ? Mists hang heavy all 
around the horizon, but there is everlast- 
ing granite beneath our feet. Can we 
not sing : — 

" There is a fountain filled with blood. 
Drawn from Immanuel's veins ; 
And sinners, plunged beneath that flood, 
Lose all their guilty stains." 



The Place of Dogma in Preaching 187 
Can we not say with the Christian poet : — 

" Oh, 'twas love, 'twas wondrous love ? 
The love of God to me. 
It brought my Saviour from above 
To die on Calvary." 



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